![]() ![]() Director Tsui Hark, schooled in both the US and Hong Kong, fills the screen with movement and energy. Its British and American baddies are cartoonishly demonised, and the plot is often convoluted to the point of impenetrability, admittedly, but what this film chiefly provides is dazzling, colourful, kinetic, epic, pre-CGI spectacle. Transposed to 1990s Hong Kong, with the handover from British to Chinese sovereignty on the horizon, this story of a Chinese rebel fighting oppressive colonialist powers had extra resonance. Jackie Chan played him in Drunken Master, and a long-running Wong Fei-hung film series during the 1950s and 60s gave roles to the fathers of Bruce Lee and Yuen Wo-ping, among many others. Like Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood, he’d been portrayed many times before. ![]() Its subject was already well known to local audiences: Wong Fei-hung was a real person: a turn-of-the-century martial arts master and healer who’s become something of a folk hero. The film that kick-started Hong Kong cinema’s kung-fu renaissance and launched Jet Li towards a future of substandard western action movies.
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