Pandemic treasures: My seven greatest martial arts films of all time
Here’s hoping these gems will be preserved for the future, and that this list inspires you to go on a kung fu wuxia film binge
Foreword
With the fall of Hong Kong to a genocidal authoritarian regime, it is unlikely that the peerless film industry of this city will ever see a resurgence that historically produced celluloid treasures the likes of A Better Tomorrow, In the Mood for Love, or Infernal Affairs.
Unconvinced? Clearly Scorsese is convinced, having bought the rights to Infernal Affairs to whitewash it into The Departed, netting him his only Best Director after thirty one years. Also in agreement is my cinematic nemesis — racist-appropriator Tarantino, shamelessly slapping his name above and in giant letters on a true masterpiece he had nothing to do with, leading to the farcical you-can’t-make-this-up-not-satire-title Quentin Tarantino Presents: Jet Li’s HERO, a film by Zhang Yimou (link).
For myself
The significance of the Hong Kong film industry’s globally acclaimed output to my psyche cannot be understated. As a child, my entire family would gather around the television at unholy hours of the night on SBS to see the only yellow faces on Australian TV we would for decades. That is, until our people started dominating Australian Masterchef (more links cause there are so many of us). But you know, we’re often just background props in Neighbours or Home and Away, despite making up 13% of the population.
My mum and dad, politically divergent in the best of times, found themselves united by the action comedy of Jackie Chan, the mou lei tou of Stephen Chow, a cinematic depiction of racism in the west by the inestimable shining light of Hong Kong’s favourite son, Bruce Lee.
The modern story is a tragedy.
In this fallen age of Cantonese film, these masterpieces face destruction. Ageing celluloid prone to fire. Bankrupt production companies. Incompatible formats. Foreign invaders with a penchant for Orwellian history manipulation.
Without an active effort to preserve, they will be but ashes lost to time, pun intended.
For our people
There are times when art is born of a culture; as in music of Black origin; and eponymous cowboy Westerns. Though in the latter case I note that there are deep interrelationships between US westerns, the Italian “spaghetti” Westerns of Sergio Leone, samurai films of Kurosawa and wuxia.
Hong Kong film runs the gamut from romantic comedy to period peices, but undoubtedly the kung fu genre and its cousin wuxia are the cinematic and literary genre born of our people, by our people, for our people. There’s also a strong one-man case to be made that Hong Kong is the real birthplace of actual action-comedy, Marvel be damned.
These films are for the world, but they were made by us, for us.
For International Chinese, unable to write to their relatives behind the Bamboo Curtain for fear of making them enemies of the state. For people never crushed under the heel of Maoism in the Chinese democracies of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; watching our culture crushed under tank treads. For modern Overseas Chinese in the West, who view — with good reason — with suspicion the Chinese Communist Party that presumes to double-speak for us “hua ren 華人”, clearly having lost the Mandate of Heaven. For us fifty million odd hua qiao 華僑, our parents seek the succor of home in a land that was lost. As generations pass, we seek connection to a land that was never ours whilst living in “free” nations that don’t really seem to want us.
These are our stories. Our mythos. Our metaphors and tales as old as time, even if they get distracted by a more than a few Hollywood executives and Marvel creative directors eager to put white faces on them; or sometimes even yellowface. Even bold, brave Bruce got the shaft.
We made these films. For each other. Telling our stories.
Because of that, for this list, I limit myself to only kung fu films; perhaps later we’ll cover a more full picture of Hong Kong film; and after that, Asian film in general.
There’s no time like right now!
In this pandemic, download, buy, or PM me to get a treasured copy of these films. Binge them with your friends and family.
Be part of the story, and seize the narrative from:
- billionaire lapdogs to the CCP
- artless imperialist appropriators, and
- an obscenely famous, unabashedly excessive celebration of meritless stationary bandits/rentier bourgeois starring the half-Asian descendants of colonial imperialism and the distorted sense of beauty this entails.
7 Stormriders
We start this list with a super hard to find film. It was “big budget” by standards of the declining 1998 HK film industry, but it is a fun and earnest wuxia flick derived from quality wuxia source canon, featuring Hong Kong’s favourite sons Ekin Cheng and Aaron Kwok whilst they were still young and hot. It was Hong Kong’s biggest box office in it is year; and I think the comic writer/illustrator went on to be invited by DC to do Wuxia Batman, which became Batman: Hong Kong. Shame the IP is not as popular as say, Dragonball Z, but in my opinion, it certainly had the potential to be.
6 Miracles
Jackie Chan’s greatest film. If you cut out all the action, it is still an amazing film. Also stars my childhood love, the late great Anita Mui. If you disagree, I will fight you one-armed with random objects lying around a wet market, holding my beltless pants in the other hand, whilst screaming “I don’t want any trouble” at the top of my lungs.
5 Ip Man
This biopic made the Donnie Yen Renaissance happen in the twilight of his career (he’s 57 in 2021!). In just this franchise, they made four films in the next decade and got him Star Wars and Mulan. Dedicated Donnie — mostly an action actor; he committed to full method acting mode to pay respects to the eponymous real-life master of Bruce Lee. A story of complaceny and hubris causing a fall from privelege during the Japanese occupation, to man who rises again as a folk hero. In subsequent films, he protrays a domestic interior, struggling with love to family and duty to people, classic hero’s journey stuff.
This film may enlighten you to aspects of the Second Sino-Japanese war that by the time of Pearl Harbor, had been going a decade; with 10–25 million Chinese civilians dead. Only real downside to this film is it has an unrelenting view of Japanese brutality to the detriment of the film overall, so a little low on the list for that.
Highlight: features a Donnie Yen version of the Bruce Lee First of Fury fight.
4 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Yes. It is brilliant. No, it doesn’t even crack top three. I mean, it does rate 97% on Rotten Tomatoes; Ten Academy awards nominations, the most of any “foreign” film until Roma.
Yes, key critique — Zhang Ziyi is pretty wooden in it. But she is pretty cinematically balletic as the eponymous Hidden Dragon. I’m jealous of the perfection of Chang Chen’s jawline. The soundtrack is masterpiece — Tan Dun again, having written the whole thing in just two weeks! Yoyo Ma gives the performance of a lifetime, making the cello sing like a zither, weep like an erhu and snap like a drum; earning both muscians a well deserved Academy Award. The story is pedestrian by wuxia standards (book 4 of the Crane Iron Pentalogy), but it was new to those in the West at the time. Unrequited love (again!), honour, duty, brotherhood, poison, intergenerational pain, “running away from it all”. This desert sequence haunts my dreams. Tiger Dragon Bar fight (that’s the third teahouse brawl in four films, if you’re counting), Yu Shu Lien Vs. Jiao Long, showing technical mastery and historical accuracy of kung fu weapons rarely seen outside a museum; used with visceral effect.
If you want the friendliest film for someone who has never watched a kung fu flick before, this is it.
3 Fist of Fury
Bruce Lee plays Chen Zhen, student of Huo Yunjia, a real-life person who basically single handedly carried the dignity of the “sick men of Asia”, two scant decades before the Rape of Nanking. The film, far more impactful any any frivolous Hollywood flick with half-Asian faces worshipping money, had quadruple impact — (1) bringing international prominence to the Hong Kong film industry, introducing both it and Bruce Lee to Hollywood, (2) realistic fight choreography forever changing the future of any martial arts film, (3) super-assertive critique of Japanese imperialism “No Chinese or Dogs Allowed” scene, and of course (4) making it such that any actor for the five decades hoping to make it as a kung fu star had to remake this film. Absolute highlight: THE FINAL FIGHT!
2 Once Upon A Time In China
Watch Jet Li kick mega butt in the best iteration of Chinese folk hero doctor-militia-leader-martial-artist-and-real-historical-figure Wong Fei Hong. Revel in the the golden age of Hong Kong cinema. Wow at the fact that it was all made for the price of a cheap automobile. Of course, Sammo Hung is the fight choreographer, and the producers managed to convince Jacky Cheung (the pop god of Hong Kong at the time) to ugly up for a minor role.
The actual story is about family, unrequited love, the survival of a subjugated people. Its sprawling themes include colonialism, indentured servitude in the Gold Rush, British-American Anglo racial arrogance, includes a very kind portrayal of Jesuit missionaries. Its complex historical backdrop is the crumbling Qing empire on the cusp of Sun Yat Sen’s democratic National Revolution; despite the problematically hypocritical romanticisation of the Qing empire’s subjugation of Vietnam.
The young Jet Li is electric as a high-minded doctor of the people, by the people, who again is only driven to violence in defense of the weak and oppressed.
The Matrix wouldn’t exist without the 8 minute fight scene of Fei-hung vs Iron Robe Yim.
You can absorb a very non-CCP view of history through watching this film; but perhaps that’s some deprogramming one can do after a lifetime of western Hollywood propaganda. Case Study: any WW2 Hollywood film.
Highlight: The opening theme song by itself is basically the national-without-a-nation anthem of Overseas Chinese, and it S L A P S.
1 Hero
If you know me, you’ll know there was never any doubt that this would be the top film on this list.
There is not a single element out of place in this film.
Masterful cinematography by Australian Christopher Doyle, auteur Wong Kar Wai’s right hand man; with unmatchable performances from love-to-tragedy from Hong Kong’s top two actor-actors of their generation, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.
Tan Dun’s magnum opus soundtrack (imho Crouching Tiger may just be a touch better).
The story itself out Nolans-Nolan, with an unreliable narrator gimmick borrowed from Rashomon and a scale in tone and script that is Shakespearean in ambition. Boss fights that’s actually only a mid-film-fight with Jet Li versus Donnie-fucking-Yen in a tea/chess house while rain falls in epic slo-mo, to the diegetic loneliness of an old man playing the qin and the sounds of Beijing Opera — greatest 3:38 minutes of kung fu film history.
Weeping poetry for a dozens of Chinese nations that once were, and never will be again, touching on their lost cultures such as calligraphy. Who needs Wonder Woman, when you have White Snow (Cheung) single handedly holding off an entire artillery division to save her and old man, some kids, and by extension her culture from conquest and slavery.
I have watched it dozens of times; and never fail to cry and shake with love and loss and tragedy — personal, philosophical/existential, ethno-cultural.
The plot highlight: None of the “heroes” aremuscly, violent people — but philosophers, lovers, calligraphers. The great titular hero in a cast of heroes is no warrior at all — his wulin swordsman name is “Chan Jian” or Ruined Sword, and his true motive is straightfoward… love, undying love of someone who doesn’t really love him back, herself too focussed on her vision of revenge leading to their star-crossed suicides.
I mean it: greatest. kungfu. film. of all time.
Earned Zhang Yimou directorship of China’s Olympic ceremonies, despite the film’s clear critique of the CCP, and basically unlimited budget for any super-indulgent film after that. Case study: House of Flying Daggers
Honourable mentions and random final comments
In my opinion, Maggie may be the most beautiful and talented person alive.
