The Final Master (Shi fu)

 Chen Shi (Liao Fan), an older Wing Chun master, arrives in Tianjin to establish a martial arts school. This means, of course, that he must defeat the masters of eight of the nineteen established dojos in the city first. Martial artists have the best bureaucracy.

 Because this is a movie written and directed by the great Haofeng Xu, though, things are rather more complicated than that. After arriving in town, Chen first meets with Zheng (Chin Shih-chieh), a local grandmaster. After duly being impressed by his skills, Zheng informs him of several wrinkles in his plans: As a foreigner, Chen can't just go around kicking everyone's ass - he'd be disqualified even if he won. So he must take on a local disciple to do it in his stead. The catch? After winning, his disciple must fight a duel with a local grandmaster, and will be banished from town no matter what the result is so the local establishment can save face.
 Zheng is pretty sure he will be the one that will be called on to duel the disciple, so he asks Chen to take him on as a secret second apprentice, and teach him everything he knows so that he runs no chance of losing the duel.

 All this is fairly simple, as far as the arcane vagaries of honor and traditions go, but don't worry, there are plenty of byzantine twists to keep things confusing.

 To keep the heat off him, Chen pretends to be a lowly commoner, and after a local waitress (Song Jia) gives him a little lip, he takes her on as his wife to help keep appearances. Chen soon finds Geng (Song Yang, Judge Archer himself), a young, uncouth coolie who turns out to be a prodigy, and starts training him in the ways of Wing Chun even though he knows that he's in it to try and steal his wife. And once Geng starts methodically trouncing all local champions, he runs afoul of Master Zou (Jiang Wenli), a delightfully evil woman who runs the city's dojos as if they were a cartel, and Lin Xiwen (Huang Jue), a ruthless colonel and a an old student of Zheng who's trying to bring the martial arts academies under the heel of the military. This is when Chen's devious plan becomes a little bit clearer.

 As with Xu's previous Judge Archer, the film basically drops you in the deep end and slowly gives you just enough information to put things together. It's hard going at times; Some of it is due to cultural remove, but now I've read a couple of translated Chinese reviews that seem similarly bewildered, I don't feel as bad. His script pays special attention to how honour and appearances bind the characters, which ironically leads them to take actions that are... less than honourable, and certainly run counter to their desires.
 It's a rich, confusing tapestry that's very rewarding to work out, but leaves the plot pretty hard to follow; I was lucky in that I watched this with my wife, who's watched a lot less Wuxia than I have, so I had to pause and try to explain what was going on a few times - these conversations and breathing space helped me work things out as I went along.

 She ended up liking it a lot, even if she gave up on fully following the plot at some point. That is largely because the major story beats are solid and dramatic, and also because the script keeps a light touch, with a lot of surprising warmth for its fully fleshed-out characters, a wry sense of humour, tight editing, some incredible visual storytelling, and... of course, a lot of excellent, varied fights.

 Xu's choreographies are quick, precise, and utterly badass - you often get the feeling that the result has been decided beforehand in the opponent's heads. This leads to an astonishing running final battle, where instead of having a protracted showoff between a handful of opponents, a single master faces a whole city's worth of martial artists in a series of minimalistic duels. It's exhilarating.

 The fights also underscore character moments, of course - there's a wonderful scene where Chen bares his soul to his wife while fending off a crowd of angry extras with a bamboo pole, daintily sitting with her in a bench, and the aforementioned final battle is both fuelled by a suitably tragic development and marks a strong character development.

 It looks beautiful, the acting is excellent, and like all of the Haofeng Xu-related movies I've seen so far it feels like there's a lot of thought and care put behind it - strong themes, wonderful characters, and a lot of humanity contortioned into strange shapes by rigid social structures and tradition. The way the plot keeps us at a distance holds it off from greatness - I'd recommend Judge Archer over this one - but it's still well worth it. 

 Sadly it's a bit of a pain to get access to Xu's other movies around these parts: his latest (100 Yards) remains without a UK release date, The Hidden Sword seems to have been completely annulled by Chinese censors for not toeing the party line, and I can only find his first (The Sword Identity) as an overpriced DVD. I'll keep at it.