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About the time that production crews started to experiment with knock-offs to ride the success of Snake in Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, Ng See Yuen rounded up every available member of the Yuen clan to choreograph another tale of a twentieth century hero.

Release
Unknown. The package was a color photocopy of another release, containing a technical description of the disc which was accurate only up to the title of the movie. Absolutely every other piece of information was wrong. The region code, the image format, the language tracks available, extras: all lies.

Starring
Leung Kar Yan, Kurata Yusuaki

In Brief
This variant of Fok’s life starts with Fok as a young boy, yearning to study his family’s kung fu, but getting nothing but grief from his father. Fok is too weak, and dad figures he’ll get smacked up one side of the street, and back down the other, thus making the family’s kung fu look like some kind of joke.

Fok family omellettes are no joking matter.

“We don’t teach strangers; we don’t teach evildoers; we don’t teach the weak.” All members of the Fok family have to sign an NDA before learning how to beat people down. This prevents outsiders from figuring out and exploiting their weaknesses; in the bit-head world, we call this “security through obscurity,” and it is considered a bad thing.

Chang San Ho arrives to tutor Yuen Gap. But it turns out that Chang is also a provincial martial arts champion, in town to hax0r the Fok school, and steal their style. Sympathetic to Yuen Gap’s nerdly predicament, Chang agrees to teach the boy kung fu along with the classics.

When he has downloaded the essence of the Fok techniques, Chang has to leave the country, but he leaves behind a manual for Yuen Gap to study.

“The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works.”

Years later, yet another script kiddie comes to challenge the Fok family. But this time, the old man is sick, and unable to school this little n00b. At this fortuitous moment, Yuen Gap shows up, and announces that he is secretly l33t. He pwns the rival master.

We shift gears now to the anti-imperialist theme, wherein Fung Hao On plays Dean Shek playing a foreign boxer, followed by Fung Fung playing a referree while Fok beats a Russian boxer.

My Krispy Kreme diet plan and recliner-to-fridge conditioning regimin have left me ill prepared for this bout.

Finally, we climb up the hierarchy of imperialists to the Japanese. On this front, the stories of Fok Yuen Gap and Chen Zhen demonstrate some ambivalence. Fok is a nationalist hero, who showed China’s potential strength, and encouraged unity, but he also preached acceptance and understanding between styles. As a result, it is typical for Fok Yuen Gap movies to show Japanese characters with dignity, honor, and great wisdom.

Nice Shots

When a student is accepted into a school, the student-teacher relationship is traditionally sealed by the student serving tea to the master. Yuen Gap is never trained by his father in this film, and the tension is subtley renewed from time to time with a shots of various masters drinking tea.

Some of the shots of the Fok family form captured the intensity and power of the style admirably. This includes some incredibly fast hand strikes close enough to the camera lens to fill the frame. Kudos.

Best Stunt(s)
Yuen Gap tosses almost every opponent he faces through at least one impressive high fall.

Fok Yuen Gap’s audition for the Village People.

Disappointments
The opening beats of the anti-imperialist theme are awkward. The humor during the boat fight with Fung Hao On looks like an afterthought, like the producer suddenly realized that he was famous for making Jackie Chan films, and figured audiences would expect a zany master with a substance abuse problem, along with a little slapstick, and at least one character losing his pants.

After spending the whole film building up the incredible power of the Fok family style, the antagonist walks in at ten minutes to doom, and flatly announces that we shan’t be seeing any of it in the final reel. For the sake of character development, this is how it has to be, but it’s still a let-down.

Final Analysis
The cycle of challengers arriving, challengers getting beat down by someone in the Fok family repeats about twice as many times as are necessary. The fights are quite good, but the story starts to feel like it’s stuck on a treadmill. Many of the fights included are based on records of the real life Fok Yuen Gap, but presented as they are here, they do not continue to provide new information about the characters, nor do they keep the story moving. The saving grace is that Leung Kar Yan and company do an excellent job of acting through the fights, giving us an emotional anchor to keep the movements from becomming empty.

When Legend of a Fighter sticks to the relationship between Fok Yuen Gap and Chang San Ho, it is emotionally powerful. The theme of openness and the treatment of family styles as trade secrets is handled well.

Three stars.

If You Like This
For more related to Fok Yun Gap, try Fearless, Fists of Fury, Fist of Legend (with Kurata Yusuaki playing the police inspector), and the TV series Fists of Fury.

For another title with some embarassing attempts to ride the success of Chan’s early films, see Of Cooks and Kung Fu.

Leung Kar Yan has over 60 film credits covering a wide range of subgenres. For a sampling, watch for him in Tiger Cage, Crystal Hunt, Justice, My Foot, Kung Fu Cult Master, Last Hero in China, and an outstanding performance in Warriors Two.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Chop Socky, Movies, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.