AMC switched things up a bit for this particular week, opening the Indian films at Causeway Street while this opened at Boston Common, counter to what's become the norm of late; I kind of suspect they didn't necessarily want three Chinese films at the 13-screen Causeway Street location, and that appears to be where Detective Chinatown 1900 is lingering. Something interesting is that, despite being right next to Chinatown, it's the first opening night for a Chinese film in a while where I didn't feel like I was the only person who needed subtitles. A lot of English being spoken on top of ethnicity, and I kind of wonder if some of the young stars are known for other things.
I don't think it was only playing in 2D because there was only room for one screen - although that was probably why 3D shows for Ne Zha 2 were initially scarce before the chain realized showtimes were going to sell out - because Sony seems relatively less enthused about using it these days, and I don't know how much the hardware side no longer putting out 3D televisions and dedicated Blu-ray 3D players has to do with it (their 4K players do tend to have 3D as an unadvertised feature) or if it's just because they're not getting much return. Doesn't much matter, I guess, except that I'd like to see it that way, and you can't even count on regular Blu-rays out of Hong Kong for Chinese movies these days, let alone 3D. But maybe we'll get lucky!
She diao ying xiong zhuan: Xia zhi da zhe (Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2025 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
There's a certain flavor of Tsui Hark film that you don't see quite so much since he started working with the big Chinese studios, the sort where he's seemingly trying to cram all the good parts of a sprawling epic into 100 minutes and doesn't quite have the FX resources it demands. During his Hong Kong heyday, he'd often have a producer credit while someone else directed, but his fingers were all over those movies. Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants is the closest he's come to that in years, for better or worse (but mostly better).
The Gallants in question are Guo Jing (Xiao Zhan), a son of the Song Kingdom who grew up in the grasslands of Mongolia, raised by the Great Khan, but who joined Huang Rong (Zhuang Dafei)on Peach Blossom Island to learn magical martial arts, but rejecting her when it appeared it appeared her father murdered his teachers. The real culprit is likely Western Venom Ouyang Feng (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), who sells the Novem Scripture which Rong-er has hidden and Jing-ge has mastered - and he might well provoke a war between the Mongols and the Jin-dominated Song in order to get it.
That muddies the story up more than a bit; as is Hark's tendency in these pictures, he front-loads with a fair amount of background to get to the stretch of the novel that he figured would make the best movie, but also occasionally jumps into flashbacks like a storyteller who sees his audience getting confused and is like oh, right, that doesn't make sense without this. For a while, it's a bit overwhelming but not much of a problem; the pieces fit even if you have to keep reaching back into the box. Once that's in place, the more serious problems start, as Hark is seemingly trying to include all the cool action scenes and melodramatic heights that there's not a whole lot of room for what goes in between. The back half of the movie has the young lovers dramatically separated and reunited without much time to feel like they're actually apart, and bombastics professions of loyalty that may or may not be enough to get someone killed and are pretty quickly forgiven. The climax is a massive showdown between the Mongol and Song armies that doesn't seem strictly necessary even before considering that all the audience really wants is Jing and Rong facing off against Feng.
It flows well, at least, in large part because, even with tragic backstory and other events pulling at them, Xiao Zuan and Zhuang Dafei have upbeat youthful energy and the chemistry to play scenes so they're not explicitly romantic but establish enough of a connection that there doesn't need to be a lot of hand-wringing about how they really feel later. Tony Leung Ka-Fai is the right villain for them, monstrous and powerful but also kind of amusingly pompous. He's big and rugged but doesn't have the sort of dignity and gravitas Bayaertu brings to The Great Khan in contrast. Zhang Wenxin is good as her daughter, a princess you can watch growing up (although she really doesn't look like the sister of the ethnically-Mongolian actors playing the Khan's sons at all).
And the action, of course, is just as much fun as you might expect; Hark has been honing this sort of high-flying, mystical martial arts for roughly forty years (since Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain in 1983), and though the action here is less aerial than in some cases, it's still larger than life and has the right weight to it, even when it's effectively force fields and chi blasts. There's impact to the blows and some freewheeling creativity to the staging that mostly doesn't quite cross over into slapstick. Even with CGI tools he could probably barely imagine forty years ago, he sometimes seems to want a little more than he has, with the CGI armies and locations not quite being top of the line. The fights between Jing, Rong, and Feng tend to be great fun, though, not quite gravity-defying but big and satisfying.
(I'm guessing that they're even better in a 3D presentation; Tsui Hark clearly plans for the technology and enjoys throwing things at the audience!)
For all that this is a big Tsui Hark fantasy-action movie where his reach exceeds his grasp by a bit, it's also possibly the most grounded of the three films in the genre released for the 2025 Lunar New Year, which is an odd turn of events, when you think about it. The result is a bit messy at times but has personality and assurance; Tsui Hark continues to do Tsui Hark stuff well.
No comments:
Post a Comment