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It's interesting the full circle journey the martial arts genre has gone through in the last three decades. From fierce foreign novelty and geek obsession to influential Tinseltown standard, the carefully choreographed action of the Hong Kong staple has become the cinematic benchmark for almost every onscreen scuffle. In return, Hollywood has influenced the form with its own unique attributes. Nowhere is this more clear than the latest from beloved director and wire fu specialist Woo-ping Yuen.
Perhaps most famous to Westerns as the man who gave The Matrix its gravity defying fisticuffs, his own unique oeuvre contains classics like Drunken Master and Iron Monkey. Now, he offers up the intriguing if trite True Legend, a typical hand-to-hand period melodrama enlivened by the filmmaker's deft touch, while some sloppy CG work distracts from the overall entertainment level.
Su Can (Vincent Zhao) is a general in the Chinese Imperial Army. When given the chance to retire and govern his home province, he graciously declines. Instead, he wants to open up a Wushu academy. So he suggests his sly brother Yuan (Andy On) take his place. Years later, the two clash when the latter kills their father. Turns out, Yuen and his sister Ying (Zhou Xun) were adopted by Su's dad, himself a master of the dark Five Venom Fists discipline.
Left for dead, our hero tries to regain his skills while his now crazed evil sibling kidnaps Su's child, Little Feng. As part of his retraining, the disgraced warrior falls in with the God of Wushu (Jay Chou), who helps him hone his skills. Unfortunately, the final battle doesn't turn out as planned, sending Su into an alcohol fueled fall. Years later, he becomes the legendary Drunken Master, using his inebriated technique to defeat his enemies.
In the moviemaking maxim of leaving well enough alone, True Legend gets lost in the translation. This is an intriguing set of ideas meshed into an experience that's both exciting and exasperating. On the one hand, our iconic director never met a fight sequence he couldn't amplify with his flashy film techniques. Bodies fly, punches land with death defying bombast, and battles blaze with a kicky kind of kinetic force that flummoxes your Westernized mindset.
As long as he's doesn't linger too long on the family inanity going on in the narrative, everything is cool. We breeze along on wave after wave of inventive maneuvering, certain we are in the presence of some manner of genius (and, of course, we are). But when forced into a standard storytelling hole, when mandated to make something out of all this half-brother bravado, Woo-ping comes up short. Indeed, True Legend limps along like a defeated combatant when it has to play plot.
Then there is the CG. The SyFy Channel is more realistic in its rendering of giant killer squid-sharks than this movie is with its many set-pieces. Backdrops look flat and featureless while other fake elements stick out like badly composed afterthoughts. Though the skill and technique of the action can overcome almost anything, the lame F/X seem to indicate a lack of a basic budgetary support. As long as the violence doesn't look cheap, everything is fine.
Unlike classics in the category that have come to define the faithful devotion to these type of films, True Legend is merely good. Greatness could have been achieved had Woo-ping spent as much time on the little things - acting, script, overall narrative arc - as he did with the fighting. Instead, we have yet another example of a highly successful and skilled genre watered down by weak American attributes.
10/10
