LEGENDS OF THE CONDOR HEROES: THE GALLANTS is the unwieldily titled new Tsui Hark joint, which I was grateful to be able to see in a theater. (This puts my lifetime Tsui Hark theatrical screenings at four, after DOUBLE TEAM, KNOCK OFF and FLYING SWORDS OF DRAGON GATE 3D IMAX). Based on a famous story by Jin Yong (whose books also inspired the SWORDSMAN trilogy), it’s the type of thing I hope for from Tsui these days: a wild and extravagant wuxia epic, expertly put together at a swaggering blockbuster scale. A great time at the movies.

It opens with narration by a guy talking about witnessing many famous battles of Genghis Khan (Baya’ertu, CREATION OF THE GODS I: KINGDOM OF STORMS) and the Mongol army. As you watch these enormous conflicts on screen you wonder how the fuck a guy was witnessing it without getting chopped to bits, and then you find out: he was perched above on a cliff. When the Mongols spot him they shoot arrows at him, but he seems to repel them with some sort of energy shield trick. Okay, good, we got a real one here. This is our protagonist Guo Jing (Xiao Zhan, THE ROOKIES), a martial artist who aspires to greatness and has an interestingly convoluted backstory.

It’s been a week and a half since I saw it, but if I’ve got it right, his family was from the Song Empire, but he was taken in by Genghis Khan’s tribe and grew up as sworn brothers with Khan’s son Tou Lui (Alan Aruna, MOSCOW MISSION). Also Khan wanted him to marry his daughter Huazheng (Zhang Wenxin), but instead he went off to college (left for the Middle Land to train with seven masters).

During this time he met and fell in love with Huang Rong (Zhuang Dafei), adorable bad girl of the Martial World. She lives on the mostly uninhabited Peach Blossom Island and makes him uncomfortable/tingly with her rebellious nature.

His masters are seven growling men whose faces are always covered in shadow. They taught him to fight well but they seem like conservative jerks. They forbid him to see Huang Rong because her dad, Heretic East, was “eccentric.” She teases Guo Jing about being obsessed with rules. She’s also a creative person, a self-proclaimed “genius of the culinary arts” who sets up a spear as a lightning rod and uses it to cook a whole chicken! She calls it her signature dish.

Another reason she’s cool is that through her dad she knows one of “The Five Greats,” Beggar North (Hu Jun, RED CLIFF, FIRESTORM, SHADOW), leader of a beggar clan who teaches Guo Jing Eighteen Dragon Subduing Palms. The couple have some good times together but break up when he finds his masters killed, blames her dad for it and storms off.

At some later point he realizes he fucked up, but in those days you couldn’t just call up your ex and apologize, you might not even know where they are, so instead he travels around leaving little pinwheels and rock markings that they had previously discussed as a tracking method for this sort of situation. Little does he know that she’s in trouble, captured by another one of “The Seven Freaks of Jiangnan,” Venom West (Tony Leung Ka-fai, A BETTER TOMORROW III, SHE SHOOTS STRAIGHT, BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS, DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME), who is also trying to become the greatest martial artist in the world, but in a more evil way than Guo Jing. This guy is a great villain because he controls snakes, plays with a spider, has a shield that expels pellets of toxic gas, and obsessively seeks a kung fu manual called the Novem Scripture. (And [SPOILER] when he gets it from Huang Rong she purposely gives it to him in mixed up order, but that drives him mad and makes him even more dangerous.)

In his travels, Guo Jing rescues his Mongol brother Tolui from an ambush and is convinced to return home to say hi to his mom Li Ping (Ada Choi, FIST OF LEGEND). Huang Rong finds his clues and follows his trail while being chased by Venom West and his men. Then she’s rescued by the Mongol princess and brought to the Mongol camp too, at which point she figures out that the dreamboat the princess keeps talking about being betrothed to is Guo Jing. Awkward. She doesn’t reveal herself to him.

So you’ve got some heartbreak/misunderstanding stuff going on here in the middle of everything else, and for me the best scene is the culmination of that romantic rivalry b-plot, when the two women duel on a rooftop. When the princess pulls out her sword Huang Rong unsheathes a weapon she calls “my dog-beating stick.” Okay, obviously I’m against there being a stick for beating dogs, but it’s such a funny way to insult her, I loved it. (Also strangely familiar – did I review something else with a “dog-beating stick” recently?) The weapons duel progresses to grappling and an excellent body slam right through the roof. It’s a great fight that fortunately ends in a truce when real danger arrives.

I don’t think LEGENDS OF THE CONDOR HEROES: THE GALLANTS reaches the heights of Tsui’s 2018 banger DETECTIVE DEE: THE FOUR HEAVENLY KINGS, but it’s in a similar vein of old fashioned wire-fu fantasy super-charged with modern digital effects without losing the joy of the old ways. In this case the large scale spectacle mostly involves one guy who’s so powerful he can take on armies. Kind of an AKIRA. Venom West is knocking people through structures using moves with cool names like “Toad’s Roar” and “Dragon Palm.” I like his computer-assisted bug eyes that make him look like a cartoon. My one complaint is that, as great as the final fight between Guo Jing and Venom West is, it leaves co-lead and best character Huang Rong literally watching from the sidelines for the climax. Otherwise it’s pretty much everything I want.

The ticket-buying kiosk at the theater specified that this was 2D, and I don’t think they have any 3D showings, but it did look like a movie that would look cool that way. For example, when they talk about the Seven Freaks they appear spinning in a black void in slow motion, and there are numerous instances of arrows, daggers, darts, fists, feet, people, debris and energy waves comin’ at ya.

I don’t personally need a movie like this to have much substance other than the little wisdoms I can read into it, like that the beggar and the daughter of the heretic have more to offer Guo Jing than his bossy, venerated masters. But I think there may be something personal in here for Tsui. Near the end of the movie Genghis Khan has amassed his troops to attack Song, which is Guo Jing’s homeland. So despite his loyalty to the Mongols and the Khan family in particular he walks onto an empty field and holds his arms out saying that if they’re going to do it, to tread right over him. It made me think of Tiananmen Square, and only then did it click that it’s pretty cool for Tsui to tell a story about a man stuck between two countries. As you may know, Tsui is truly international – he was raised in Saigon, studied film in Austin, became a titan of the Hong Kong cinema New Wave, gave us those two beautiful Van Damme movies, now he seems most interested in giant Chinese blockbusters, but it must bother him that the Hong Kong industry no longer has the same freedoms that allowed him to flourish. So he’s gotta relate to a guy stuck between his adopted country and his homeland.

Legend of the Condor Heroes started as a 1957 serialized story that was turned into a novel and was followed by two sequels. It has been adapted into or riffed on by many movies and TV shows including the Shaw Brothers THE BRAVE ARCHER trilogy and Wong Kar Wai’s ASHES OF TIME. According to Wikipedia, this one is specifically based on chapters 34 through 40 of the novel! I must admit that due to the title I thought some people were gonna have wings and fly around at some point, but it turns out the English title is a bad translation. A more literal one is “Legend of the Eagle Shooting Heroes,” and that comes from a part in the book (not this movie) where a young Guo Jing shoots two eagles with one arrow. Despite that confusion I didn’t feel my lack of familiarity with the saga kept me from following the movie.

I’m a sucker for this type of thing – you got kung fu all over the place, all kinds of gimmicky weapons, super powers, everything’s way larger than life but also you have regular human values like a love for misfits and a romance and a plea for world peace. They are delicious ingredients, and in Tsui Hark we have a genuine master stirring them together, a veteran visionary who has grown into one of the very best at this type of popcorn epic. If you share this interest and LEGENDS OF THE CONDOR HEROES: THE GALLANTS is playing in a theater near you I highly recommend it.