Reign of Assassins (Jianyu Jianghu)

 The Dark Stone gang, a powerful group of assassins, is after the remains of an the ancient Buddhist monk Bodhi in the belief that the corpse would give its bearer fancy martial arts powers. The bastards kill the possessor of the corpse and his son in cold blood, but one of the assassins - the beautiful Xi Yu (Kelly Lin) - out-assholes them all and flees with the top half of the corpse.

 While on the lam, she meets a roving monk called Wisdom. It's unclear whether the relationship is romantic (Wisdom does eventually confess to have a crush), but they spend three months training before Xi Yu kills him during a lesson when she loses her cool. Distraught, she takes his dying advice and decides to honour him by never killing anyone else.

 And so she travels to a doctor who operates (heh) out of a houseboat, and asks him to give her a new face so she can start a new life. I should note plastic surgery in Jianghu - the martial arts world - involves poison, flesh-eating insects working from the inside out, and gold thread; Just one more reason why we love wuxia.

 And thus Xi Yu transforms into Zeng Jing (Michelle Yeoh) and starts a new civilian life as a cloth merchant; She soon meets Ah-sheng (Jung Woo-sung), a humble courier, and they marry.
 Their placid life is briefly interrupted when they are both caught in a bank robbery; When it turns ugly she single-handedly foils the kung-fu-powered robbers and is outed as a badass, Ah-sheng's reaction? 'I don't care if you were a brigand, now you're my wife.' Loving and slightly demeaning, but I think that's just the translation - it's supposed to be romantic.

 The attack at the bank draws the attention of the rest of the Black Stone Gang, who have replaced Xi Yu with Turquoise (the recently late Barbie Hsu). The leader, The Wheel King (Wang Xueqi) performs something I always enjoy: Kung-fu forensics, and uses it to determine that the person who defeated the robbers could be no one but Xi Yu.
 The assassins face off again, and the stray swordswoman is coerced to retrieve both halves of the ancient monk's body for team evil. Assassins gonna reign, or something. Which of course leads to a few surprises, a lot of fights, and melodrama to spare.

 The script, by main director Su Chao-pin, is fairly sloppy; there are many contrivances, unnecessary scenes, and the all-important MacGuffin which drives the action is oddly relegated to the background and eventually forgotten.

 But the thrust of the story is powerful, and as forward momentum accumulates, disparate elements that had been previously established come together in highly satisfying/entertaining ways. For all the script's problems, it can be pretty clever, and its entry-level use of Buddhist philosophy can even be seen as wisdom, if you look at it from the appropriate angle and with enough goodwill.

 The story is also full of odd, cool touches and excellent acting. Many characters, including the villains, get splashes of backstory that give them a lot of colour, and there's a sense of humour about the movie that makes it very likeable. It's a good one.

 There are plenty of interesting martial arts on display; Things like Xi Yu fighting with a thin, flexible blade that bends to strike targets from an unexpected angle (kind of like the way flails were supposed to curve over shields), or a magician (Leon Dai) who uses flaming swords.

 The problem is that the director does not shoot the action cleanly; The edits are short, and the camera often too close to the actors. It's not bad, exactly: The fights are easy enough to read, and they clearly prioritize making the cast look good and showcasing cool moments; In that, the director succeeds. But the scenes don't flow well, and I was often frustrated at the choppy quality of the combat as the edits jumped from one beat to the next, often completely changing angles. This break with Hong Kong tradition is especially galling because they had John Woo in an advisory capacity for enough time that he's billed as a co-director.

 And yet... I can't be disappointed with a movie that begins with a single assassin fighting and killing a whole kung-fu family, starting with their very young son. In self-defense, no less!

 Elsewhere the film looks very good. The cinematography (Wikipedia lists five cinematographers) is good, and the editing style, while it takes some getting used to, gives it a sort of elegant, flowing quality.

 This is one of the rare wuxia movies where the story far outshines the action. The cast is gifted, the wire-work is great, and the choreographies are excellent and have plenty of cool moves... it's a shame that we can't enjoy all of that properly. Other than that and some storytelling glitches, it's an excellent wuxia tale: enthralling, often funny, and surprisingly sweet.

Tai Chi Master

 When Tian Bao joins a Shaolin temple as a child, his new master (Lau Shun) pairs him up with the younger Jun Bao. Their relationship is established immediately and economically: Their master asks Chin to call Jun his senior, since he's already a student and will mentor him. Tian bristles at this, since he's older and bigger; So he tells Jun he'll only call him senior when there are others around, and when they're alone he'll be the senior. Jun, although leery of disobeying authority, happily goes along with it.

 After watching some of the older kids training kung fu, they quickly enroll and start obsessing over it. Their master cautions them that they should only use it to help others, but the first thing Tian Bao uses it for is to beat up a bully, getting both of the kids into trouble. This dynamic holds until Tian and Jun grow up to be Siu-Ho Chin and Jet Li, respectively; Tian is impulsive, aggressive and ambitious, while Jun is more kind-hearted and happy-go-lucky. Their friendship is fierce, though, and they both always look out for each other.

 Their stay at the temple comes to an end when Tian gets into trouble for over-reacting to another another student cheating in an exam fight; Jun tries to smooth things over, but when Tian attacks a monk only their master's intercession allows them to escape.

 He tells his students that a temple is not the only place to learn and sends them out to the wider world. Worried about Tian, he gifts him with a scroll of Tai Chi teachings to guide him.

 In town they soon bond (by the medium of kicking injustice in the ass) with lovely thief Miss Li (Fennie Yuen) and even lovelier abandoned wife Siu-Lin (Michelle Yeoh) - Miss Li has a fight against soldiers extorting local merchants, and Siu-Lin is attacked by her ex-husband's powerful new bride when she confronts him. Yes, this is the sort of movie where pretty much anyone knows kung-fu.

 The sworn brothers hole up in a restaurant and befriend the owners, who are soon revealed to be connected to the resistance against the evil eunuch (is there any other kind?) Liu Jin (Sun Jian-kui), who rules his lands with an iron fist.

 But Tian is not about to join the peasants in their struggle, and quickly grovels and manipulates his way into joining the eunuch's forces instead; Jun, aghast, refuses to follow, but they part amicably enough.

 Events conspire to reunite them soon afterwards when government forces try to extort the restaurant, and Tian helps the rebels cover up the ensuing soldier massacre. He also gives the rebels some inside information on when they can catch the eunuch Liu Jun unawares.

 Before you can say "it's a trap!", Tian gathers all the rebels in one spot and - in a pretty chilling scene - has most of them massacred; Only Jun and a couple others manage to escape. I should point out that when Tian gets a promotion for wiping out his former friends, his new uniform is appropriately evil-looking, all studded black leather and ridges. That's the sort of over-the-top visual storytelling I can really get behind.

 The betrayal breaks Jun's mind. Siu-Lin and a comic relief character take him back to an estate to try to nurse him back to sanity, which leads to a meandering 'wacky' portion of the film as Jun acts looney tunes crazy. Some of the jokes are pretty funny, but a lot of them aren't, and this section drags a little too long. It also indulges in whiplash inducing tone changes, from maudlin to broad comedy to deadly seriousness as we catch up with what Tian is up to back at the army barracks. But the situation is resolved with a really satisfying callback to a seemingly abandoned plot thread, leading to a very cool tai chi epiphany and a suitably epic confrontation against Tian.

 I actually hadn't seen this one until now! I watched tons of older martial arts movies when I was a kid, but by the mid-90s I foolishly thought I'd outgrown them. I caught up with a few of the more renowned ones later, like the wonderful Iron Monkey, the Swordsmen and the Once Upon a Time In Chinas, but I obviously have a lot of blinds spots left and I'm really (flying) kicking myself for not catching this one earlier.

 Kim Yip's script is uncommonly good, with a really well-handled, classic friends-turned-opponents arc and a series of powerful messages with actual wisdom backing them. The leads are both excellent - Jet Li is a given, but he's upstaged by Chin Siu Ho - his character is so magnetic that all the little steps towards total asshole-dom make sense in context and feel almost... well, never justifiable, but almost understandable. Michelle Yeoh plays backup, unfortunately, but she's as good as she always is, and definitely looks the coolest.

Sorry, Mr. Li. It's not even a contest.

 Of course, this being a movie by Yuen Woo-ping, it's chock-full of amazing fights, immaculately shot and full of inventive moments where the characters express themselves by the medium of kicking ass; There's a fight on an oiled floor where our heroes use the fallen as platforms, a table-breaking fight where one of the combatants ends up using a broken table's legs as stilts, and another one where an army commander literally throws soldiers at his opponent. It's an absolute joy, and had me laughing out loudly in appreciation several times.

 It'd be worth it several times over just for the action, but there's so much more on offer here.

The Heroic Trio

 The Heroic Trio is a Hong Kong superhero movie from 1993 that I remembered pretty fondly, mostly for being absolutely batshit crazy. And yeah, that's still pretty much the main takeaway. 

 Here's a small list of what you can expect out of it:
 - A house viewing devolves into someone jumping out a second floor window, using the tendrils of ivy outside both as a Tarzan-style brachiation aid and as a lasso to catch a thief.
 - An invisible assailant steals two babies from police custody, and a female superhero comes to stop it; There's running across electric wires, a falling baby (a running theme throughout the movie; not all of them survive), and all sorts of crazy stunts.
 - The invisible assailant, who turns out to be Michelle Yeoh, reaches an evil underground lair and is gratuitously attacked by a crazed kung fu guardian.
 - We meet this guy:

 - When a child falls from a (different) tall building, someone jumps after her, falls faster and rescues both the kid and her cute kitten.
 - Some criminals hole up in a chemical plant with hostages; All the police can do is look on helplessly while they gun down a helpless woman. Then a mercenary shows up, puts some dynamite in an open empty barrel, sits on it as if it were a horse, and uses the explosion to vault into the second floor and take out all the criminals with her trusty shotgun. It's just as silly/amazing as it sounds.
 - A crazy man goes into a maternity ward to, in his words, "kill all the babies". He's foiled.

 And all of this happens within the first half hour! And I didn't even mention all the cheesy melodrama, corny comedy scene setting with the police and other random shit.

 The plot involves some sort of undead eunuch trying to set up an Emperor for China by kidnapping a bunch of babies. He's coercing Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh) to do his evil bidding, and is opposed by straight-laced superhero Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) and fun-loving mercenary Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung). As the title of the movie implies, the Invisible Woman may have a change of heart at some point.
 It's a Hong Kong take on American four-color comic stories, and it does a pretty good job of merging both types of madness. The results are never boring, but unfortunately the childish plotting, whiplash-inducing tone swings, wall-to-wall posturing, extremely broad humor, mawkish melodrama, and forced camp does kind of bring it down a few notches.

 It just doesn't ever pause to catch a breath. Everything is always dialed up to eleven; the constant barrage of heightened drama gets tiring, and the lack of anything substantive to latch onto -and the sense that the writer (Sandy Shaw) is just making it up as she goes along- makes it almost impossible to care about any of the events or characters. Even when it's a cute, doomed baby.

 Mui and Yeoh unfortunately don't get to do a lot with their characters - Mui is the earnest, glamorous, properly heroic one, and Yeoh gets the lion's share of all the angsty melodrama. They both look amazing, though. Cheung plays the sassy one - bad news is that she gets most of the shitty comedy bits, but at least she looks like she's having fun.
 The film is directed by Johnnie To, but this is a very, very different To than the one who'll eventually direct Election or The Mission; here he just piles on the scenes without any concern for pacing or coherence. It looks great, if you can get over the overtly campy tone. At least there's ample warning as the movie opens with a reference to the sixties batman series.

 And there's a lot of cool stuff. There's a bit where a motorcycle is driven off a wall and hurled, spinning horizontally, at a bad guy wielding a weapon straight out of Master of the Flying Guillotine. The villain's final form is an organic take on The Terminator's skeletal robot, one that opens its ribcage, traps Michelle Yeoh in it, and then puppeteers her to fight her teammates.
 The action is good, but except for a couple of fights it's the less exciting style of Hong Kong fights: pirouettes and twirly acrobatics rather than intricate combat, with a focus on things looking cool and fast, not so much on detail. Lots and lots of wire-assisted stunts, a lot of which look pretty silly but are a lot of fun.

 It's completely nuts in a way that works for it just as much as it works against it; I still like it a lot, but it's a hard movie to recommend to people who aren't used to this sort of thing.