OUR REVIEW
by Dave White
Who's in It: Jet Li, Nakamura Shido, Li Sun, Dong Yong
The Basics: Li is Huo Yuanjia, who was a real guy but whose life has been fictionalized here for syrupy effect. He's a big-ego martial arts master who gets a tragic comeuppance, and then he goes to a metaphor farm where they teach him all about life and love and honor and discipline and blah, blah, blah. His new fighting technique? Pretty stoppable.
What's the Deal? Why does any filmmaker think for one second that I want to learn about the superior spiritual practices of agrarian life when I've clearly come to see Li battle the bad guys? All I want is to watch him teach archnemeses some life lessons about what the ceiling of the hospital looks like.
What Li Learns on the Farm: To slow down, to honor the wind, to plant the rice properly so it can grow, to truly "see" without his eyes (there's a beautiful blind girl on the farm specially trained in this sort of thing) and to take long, long naps like the one I took during that part of the movie.
Time to Apply My Newly Developed Tony Jaa Rule: Jaa (Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, The Protector) should have showed up during the first moments of Li's downtime on the farm — a chunk of film that lasts a good 45 minutes — and begun kicking faces left and right to snap Li out of it and get him back to town and fighting again.
I'm the Reason This Is the Last Jet Li Martial Arts Film: He says this is the last one because audiences don't understand the spiritual side of it. And he's right. I could care less. I just want to see out-of-control, neck-breaking insanity. And I'm not sorry
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