Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book (28 page)

One of the two was innocuously titled
New Legend of Shaolin,
in which Jet played Hung Hsi-Kwan, another legendary kung fu character who took the road of vengeance after the Shaolin Temple
was betrayed and destroyed. This new movie version, however, also showcased the pubescent martial arts prodigy Xie Miao
, who played Jet’s son. Given that this effort was also directed by Wong Jing
, things don’t stay sane for long. Soon the Shaolin betrayer becomes super-powered, able to spit poison, and rides all over ancient China in a silver-spiked deathmobile. Besides that, Hung is eventually saddled with a whole bunch of Shaolin kids, all of whom must unite in the very confusing and, ultimately very silly, final battle.

Of a little more interest was
The Bodyguard
From Beijing
,
director Corey Yuen Kwai
’s Chinese take on the Kevin Costner
-Whitney Houston
Bodyguard
(1992). This Asian variation features the sultry Christy Cheung as a rich man’s wife who witnessed a horrible murder and now must be protected from a brutal kung fu killer (powerfully played by Ngai Sing
). The beginning of the film is taken up with the staunch mainland bodyguard getting used to Westernized Hong Kong ways. The middle is given over to silly comedy and gunplay, but the last half-hour is solid action, as Jet and Ngai go at it in Christy’s darkened, gas-filled apartment.

Jet’s audience was impressed by his ability to segue from classic kung fu to modern gun play, but no one seemed pleased when it was announced that he planned to remake what was arguably Bruce Lee
’s best film,
Fist of Fury
. The media was in an uproar: sacrilege! And, indeed, when Jet’s more politically correct, revisionist version first came out, the HK box-office returns were weak. But it was immediately embraced by fans in the rest of the world as Jet’s martial art magnum opus. Like Liang’s
Legendary Weapons of China
, Sammo’s
Dragons Forever
, and Jackie’s
Drunken Master 2
, Jet, with the help of director Gordon Chan
, immortalized his kung fu at its height.

Jet maintained that his new
Fist of Fury
,
now called
Fist of Legend
(1994), was more faithful to the source material and more relevant to the times. The differences between the two films were certainly telling. Unlike Bruce, Jet did not have to convince his audience that the Chinese were not the weaklings of Asia. Nor did he think it wise to maintain the rampant hatred of the Japanese that drove the original. Instead, they created both good and evil Japanese, as well as good and evil Chinese. They even added an interracial love story: the hero, Chen Zhen
, is in love with a Japanese girl — the niece of a great Japanese sensei (played by the great Shoji Kurata
).

But it was the martial arts, choreographed once again by Yuen Wo-ping
, which really made
Fist of Legend
a classic. The film is filled with great fights, each one better than the last. It starts with Chen studying in Japan
when a bunch of karate
toughs try to force him out of school. He mops the classroom with them, sometimes literally, in a bracingly brutal scene that shows him dislocating jaws and breaking limbs. When Zhen learns that his sifu has been killed in a martial arts duel, he confronts the winner’s students and mops the place with them (at one point flipping a student by his mouth … then slowly wiping the student’s saliva from his fingers). He then tests the man who “defeated” his sifu in a lovely battle in which Chen repeatedly “gets in his face” — showing again and again that the “victor” is not skilled enough to even keep the sifu’s student away.

By personally digging out his buried master’s liver to test for poison, Jet runs afoul of both the enemy students and the racism of his own school’s “brothers.” He must confront his dead sifu’s son, who is murderously envious of Li’s skills. At first he goes easy on him, but Jet soon unleashes a new skill called “boxing” (shades of
Born
to
Defense
).
Emerging victorious, he is still exiled by his racist superiors in the company of his Japanese lady love. Jet must then face her uncle in a terrific scene that compares and contrasts Asian styles. It ends with the film’s most important dialogue.

After Shoji has called the confrontation a draw in the original Chinese version of the film, Jet asks: “But isn’t the whole idea to win?”

To which Kurata replies: “If you want to win a fight, bring a gun. Martial arts is about balance and inner energy.”

With that, Jet had struck the first blow for a new direction in the Hong Kong Kung Fu Cinema New Wave. But
Fist of Legend
was not over yet. Jet must still face his sifu’s most virulent enemy (and the real killer): the man known as the General of Death — powerfully portrayed by Billy Chow
(aka Chow Bey-lai). Chow also beautifully fought Sammo in
Eastern Condors
,
Yuen in
Dragons Forever
,
and Jackie in
Miracle.
Now it’s Jet’s turn, and, for fifteen marvelously orchestrated minutes, they go at it with brutal hung gar
, taichi
-flavored wushu, and even kick-boxing
… until Billy grabs a samurai sword, forcing Jet to use his belt the way Bruce used his nunchaku.

Although they can’t bring themselves to kill Jet at the end, ala Bruce (a loophole Donnie Yen
would eventually leap through),
Fist of Legend
ranks with Li’s
Shaolin Temple
and
Once Upon a Time in China
II
as among the very best of the best. After that, Jet took time to slow down. He had been through monumental changes, and his early wushu teaching was grating uncomfortably against the dog eat dog world of kung fu cinema. Wo-ping had shown him a new way to synthesize fighting — something that didn’t require muscle against muscle, anger against hated, and vengeance against vendetta. But while he considered this, he managed to make two more movies in 1995 — and they were odd, to say the least.

My
Father Is a Hero
(1995) is Jet and Corey Yuen Kwai
’s low-rent version of James Cameron
and Arnold Schwarzenegger
’s
True Lies
(1994, which, in turn, was based on a 1991 French film called
La Totale
)
.
This film reunites Jet with Xie Miao
, the pubescent kung fu prodigy from
New Legend of Shaolin
, and uses the boy to wring pathos from its increasingly out-of-control plot. To push the audiences’ buttons,
they bring the kid back from the dead not once, but twice during the frenetic proceedings, and finish up the final fight with Jet using him as a living yo-yo — hurling him back and forth at the villains with a rope!

Also disappointing, but for entirely different reasons, was
High Risk
(1995) which was reportedly Wong Jing
’s
attempt to co-star Jet Li
and Jackie Chan
. But
when Jackie dropped out, the film became a vicious satire
(read: attack) on Chan, featuring the talented Jackie Cheung
as an action star who wears Bruce Lee
’s black-striped yellow outfit from
Game of Death
, has a father and manager who look just like Jackie’s and, to top it off, is a drunk, skirt chaser, and total fraud.

Responding to rumors that it was director Stanley Tong
, not Jackie, who did the jump between buildings in
Rumble in the Bronx
, Jing sets up a similar stunt in
High Risk
,
and then shows how Cheung’s character fakes it — but takes credit for it anyway. From there, the movie piles on — painting Cheung’s character as a sniveling coward to boot — an attribute that even the most negative of Jackie Chan
critics can’t
ascribe to the superstar. Even so, Jing continues to mercilessly lampoon Willie Chan
, Jackie’s manager, and even go so far as to cruelly kill Jackie’s cinematic father. This cruelty really makes
High Risk
hit a sour note, despite Li’s strong performance as a bodyguard who must save the star,
Die Hard
-
style, from terrorists in a high rise. Despite its title, this mean-spirited effort marks a low point in Jet’s
filmography.

By then, however, it was clear even to Jet’s most ardent fans that he was basically just making money in case things went south after Britain’s lease on Hong Kong ran out in 1997.
Black Mask
(1996) was a stylish, entertaining action picture, directed by Daniel Lee
, that allowed Jet to dress up like Kato
. Touted as the most expensive non-Jackie Chan
Hong Kong movie ($HK65,000,000), this tale of a top secret government plan to create super-soldiers has plenty of style, kinkiness (the heroine and villainess spend a notable amount of time in bondage), and deja vu (when our masked hero and super-powered super-soldier-supreme adversary slug it out in a gas-filled catacomb).

Jet coasted the remainder of the year in the very odd
Dr. Wai in the Scripture With No Words
(1996), a troubled movie within a movie. Li plays both a frustrated author, as well as the lead character in the writer’s unraveling story. Although directed by Ching Siu-tung
, neither the fantasy nor the reality portions of the effort were particularly riveting. So, with the end of an era fast approaching, Jet had to make a decision about his future. He may have realized that he needed cinematic closure, or they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Whatever the reason, in 1997, Hong Kong’s changeover year, Jet returned to the role of
Wong Fei-hung.

“Okay, okay,” Tsui Hark
seemingly admitted by producing
Black Mask
, “Without me, you’re something.” Therefore Jet agreed to star in
Once Upon a Time in China VI: The Lion Goes West
, aka
Once Upon a Time in China and America
(1997). It was a cause for celebration for Jet’s fans and a cause for resentment for Jackie’s fans. Not only had Li starred in the insulting
High Risk
, but
The Lion Goes West
was a title and concept that Chan had publicly suggested as a project with Francis Ford Coppola
. Then, to add injury to insult, Tsui signed Sammo Hung
, fresh off helming
Mr. Nice Guy
, to direct and choreograph.

Apparently, Chan had the last laugh, as word has it that this was an extremely arduous and disorganized production. Jet, Sammo, Rosamund Kwan
, and company reportedly tromped all over Texas, filming whatever they could think of as they went along. The finished film reflects the production chaos. Foreshadowed conflicts come to nothing. Main villains are changed midstream.
Wong Fei-hung jerks back and forth between fighting bloodthirsty Indians and protecting Native Americans. Characters and subplots are introduced, only to be summarily eliminated.

There is some exciting kung fu, but it is essentially over by the film’s midpoint. Running out of time and money, Sammo and crew hastily patched together a painfully anti-climatic final battle that relies far more on photography than fighting.
Once Upon a Time in China and America
was only successful if Jet’s purpose was to disentangle himself from the character of
Wong Fei-hung. Like
Diamonds Are Forever
(1971), which Sean Connery
used to similarly detach himself from James Bond
,
Once Upon a Time in China VI
made money at the box office, but not much else. Jet Li
wrapped up his initial Hong Kong tenure with
Hitman
(1998), a minor, but enjoyable, action comedy in which a down-on-his-luck martial artist enters an assassination contest.

But then Mel Gibson
, Danny Glover
, and director Richard Donner
came calling. They wanted a powerful Chinese villain for
Lethal Weapon
4
(1998), the latest in their series of landmark “buddy cop” films. Supposedly, they first offered the role to Jackie Chan
, but he understandably didn’t want to play the bad guy. Instead, he decided to do a riskier little film with no major stars instead …
Rush Hour
.