Cynical Cinema

Over the last few years, Alliance Films and Dragon Dynasty have teamed up to release some of the biggest and best Asian martial arts movies in the world. Their latest release is The Rebel, out November 4th. This movie was the biggest box-office hit in Vietnamese history, according to the DVD box. I have been trying to look up the history of home-box-office in Vietnam, but I can’t seem to find any data to see what movie is now #2. So I will trust the DVD case. And I believe it. The Rebel is the perfect box-office movie - it’s an hour and forty-five minutes long, so you’re out of the theatre fast, and yet it is so sweeping and comprehensive that you feel like you’ve just watched an epic. It is tight and fast, with tons of action and some attractive, bankable stars. If it weren’t for the visceral, angry reaction American audiences have when they see subtitles, this could possibly have done big box office in North America too.

The Rebel is designed to start at the same point as all blockbusters, and end at the same point as all blockbusters. It keeps its head down, touches all the bases in order and fits the exact mold you expect from a movie. The twist near the end, the love interest that develops slowly over the course of the movie, the crazy bad-ass martial arts bad guy, the crazy bad-ass martial arts good guy. The Rebel hits all the plot points one expects from Asian kung-fu movies. And all the plot points one expects from She’s All That. And although up until this point, I may seem as though I am knocking this film, I’m really not. Just because it’s formulaic doesn’t mean it doesn’t kick ass. And it certainly kicks ass. The star of the film may be familiar to Asian cinema enthusiasts. Johnny Tri Nguyen was the bad guy opposite Tony Jaa in The Protector, and now he gets to try his hand at being the good guy. Which is cool, except he still has that Asian Villain look in his eye the whole time, I suspect through no fault of his own. Which sets up the twist, and although it’s predictable and confusing, it’s still entertaining.

The Rebel is set in Vietnam in the 1920s, and Johnny Tri Nguyen and Dustin Nguyen work for the French, who are occupying the country. They are bad-ass kung-fu ass-kickers and other-hyphenated cool-stuff. Despite their badassery, however, they are unable to stop an assassination attempt by rebels on a French official. It turns out that Dustin Nguyen, who ends up being the bad guy in the film, allowed this man to be killed so he could catch the rebels doing it. One of those captured rebels is Veronica Ngo, who is a gorgeous Asian pop star. In real life, not in the movie. In the movie, she is the daughter of the rebel leader, and the bad guy wants to use her to smoke out her father and crush the Vietnamese rebellion. But our hero has a crisis of conscience, and helps her break out of prison. The two of them go on the run, heading back to the rebel hideout with the French in hot pursuit.

The French bad guys in this film seem to all be cut from the same mold. They are beefy, square-jawed, single-minded, steely-eyed dudes with shaved heads and limited vocabularies. Only the two or three guys at the top are actually capable of stringing together real sentences, and even then they are able to do so in the same way Alan Rickman does in Die Hard - their eloquence serves only to underline the fact that they are really evil. But in the end, the French are meaningless. It is Dustin Nguyen who is the real bad guy, and we know right away that the final fight scene is going to come down to a big showdown where he’s the one who has to be taken out. Throughout the whole movie, it’s never explained why he seems to be impervious to injury - he gets punched and kicked, and shakes it off. Knives don’t cut him. He’s like some kind of supervillain, with mommy and daddy issues and a sadistic mean streak. But no explanation for why he is mostly stab-proof.

Anyway, the escape for Ngo and Nguyen leads them through a French forced-labour camp, where they beat up a bunch of guards and take off. For some reason, they allow the French to pick up their weapons and come after them, when it would have been far easier to allow the slaves to grab the guns and keep the French at bay. There are some fight scenes that are dark and grainy and confusing in the forest. And then there are some fight scenes that are presented without much explanation at all. There’s the hero. Here comes one of the bad guys. Why does he want to fight the hero? How did he find him? What are they fighting about?

Frankly, who cares? The fight scenes here are just too cool to worry about motivation and plausibility. They are focused mainly on really cool, legs-around the throat spinning takedowns, which is always fun to watch. Also cool are the crazy spinning kicks, the kind where the feet come down on the top of the bad guy’s head, and knock him six feet sideways. The final fight scene is equally badass, because both guys in that scene are capable of the mad spinning hardcore kicks to the head. And that is the real reason to watch The Rebel. The one thing you want in a kung-fu movie is great kung-fu, and The Rebel delivers. The plot is trite but passable. The acting is, for the most part, pretty good. And the fights are outstanding. And that is reason enough to pick this one up on Tuesday.

Bruce Lee is one of the most revered actors in history, mostly because of a continuing cult following that keeps his name alive. And certainly he was a major movie star while he was here on this Earth. But in point of fact, he really only did one movie that was a classic. Enter the Dragon is justifiably called the greatest martial arts movie of all time. But the rest of his career was full of misfires and fairly bad films like Fists of Fury, and The Chinese Connection. Lee’s charisma and toughness and charm came through loud and clear in these films, but that was about all they had going for them. And there was no greater affront to the movie-going public than Game of Death. This is a film which Lee had begun when he suddenly died in 1973.

The idea was to make this movie a showcase for the martial art that Lee had just invented, Jeet Kune Do. And it remains kinda cool, if only because it features an amazing fight scene between Bruce Lee and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But there were only twelve minutes of Game of Death filmed when Lee died, and they went ahead and made the movie anyway. So it was a bunch of out-takes from Lee’s career, scenes from other movies spliced in, and then culminated with the big fight with Abdul-Jabbar, among others. Which made for an absolutely dreadful jumble of a mishmash of a collage of a movie. With a pretty cool fight to end it all.

Finishing the Game is a DVD that imagines a search for Bruce Lee’s replacement in 1973. It’s a mockumentary about a bunch of wannabe martial arts actors who are trying out for the part replacing the action hero in the film. There are aspiring actors, doctors, porn stars, and children’s mascots who try out for the role. There is also an action star named “Breeze Loo”, who is clearly the equivalent of “Bruce Li” in the 70s - a guy who basically mimicked Bruce Lee in every single way, and changed his name to a similar one in order to capitalize on Lee’s popularity. There are some funny moments, like the one involving the actor from a fictional 70s show called “Golden Gate Guns” who is now a vacuum salesman. But it goes on way too long.

The premise is funny, the set up is good, but then this movie does absolutely nothing for an hour. It just follows a bunch of characters around, and while there are some slightly humorous moments, the characters are not interesting enough to make this movie go. It does involve Ron Jeremy, and it does a decent job of sending up the B-movie film industry, it just doesn’t make for a good movie. But it’s still certainly better than Game of Death.