Donnie Yen is THE LOST BLADESMAN. Not THE LAST BLADESMAN, that would be different. That would be a white guy. No, he’s the Lost Bladesman, and not lost in the sense of “oh shit, where the fuck am I? I could’ve sworn this trail went back to the river. Am I going in circles now?” but more, I think, in the sense of “I have lost track of my purpose in this world.”
See, he’s General Guan of the Three Kingdoms Era. I had to go back and check my handy RED CLIFF chart to remember, but Guan was one of the two generals working under Lui Bei to stand on the cliff and face the much larger army and navy of Cao Cao. He’s not the human battering ram with the eyebrows, he’s the other one. (read the rest of this shit…)
BANKGKOK KNOCKOUT is the name of the latest cinematic knee to the skull from those crazy fuckin Thai stunt people – the guys with the amazingly acrobatic, bone-crunching martial arts, the unbelievable falls and vehicle hits, the guys who get knocked off of trucks or hit by motorcycles for real, and make all the stunt people in every other country look like total sissies. Here in the U.S., Magnet Films will release it on DVD August 30th under the title “BKO: BANGKOK KNOCKOUT,” which stands for “BANGKOK KNOCKOUT: BANGKOK KNOCKOUT.” It’s directed by Panna Rittikrai, who’s had a hand in pretty much all of the modern Thai action classics. He was director of BORN TO FIGHT and ONG BAK 2-3 (taking over after Tony Jaa left), and choregrapher for ONG BAK, TOM-YUM-GOONG/THE PROTECTOR and CHOCOLATE. He was Jaa’s mentor and founder of the Muay Thai Stunt team. He’s pretty much the godfather of this shit. 
Remember THE WARRIOR’S WAY? Kind of an under the radar cowboys ‘n samurais movie from last year, director with no track record, Geoffrey Rush and Kate Bosworth in the cast, hard to know what to expect from that weird combination of factors. I heard it was pretty good, but I also heard it was one of those movies that’s pretty much all done in front of green screens. I almost went to see it for the week or two it was playing in theaters, but I chickened out, waited for the spinning disc. 
THE PROTECTOR is Jackie Chan’s second English-language starring vehicle after BATTLE CREEK BRAWL/THE BIG BRAWL. Both are notorious as terrible wastes of Chan’s talent.
POLICE STORY, directed by and starring circa-1985 Jackie Chan, starts out seeming more serious than most of his movies. Jackie and a bunch of other cops have to raid a huge shantytown looking for drug dealers, and it leads to a chaotic shootout through narrow paths and rickety structures. One of the cops is so scared he actually pisses his pants, and it’s played for humiliation, not for laughs. These guys know that alot of people are about to be killed, including some of them.
EXCESSIVE FORCE is a pretty generic cop-who-can-kick action movie from Jon Hess, the director of ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION. That would be funny if it was the same guy that did NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, but I guess that was Jared Hess. It’s written by and stars Thomas Ian Griffith.
As successful as they may be in their own countries, global superstars always seem to have their eye on the juicy, low-hanging grape of Hollywood. It doesn’t matter how many soldiers have fallen before them, stumbling on a new language, style and approach to filmmaking and bleeding away everything that made them great in the first place. It’s still hard to resist the temptation. They’re still gonna jump and try to bite it.
LITTLE BIG SOLDIER played at the Seattle International Film Festival last year, and I didn’t see it. Then a region 2 dvd and a blu-ray came out and I didn’t see it. Then it played at ActionFest, which was far away, so I rented the blu-ray.
MERANTAU is a simple, straight forward martial arts movie from Indonesia. Iko Uwais plays a young man named Yuda (I know, make a Yoda joke, or “Yuda man” or something) who goes on his merantau, his journey to find himself and become a man. He lives out in the boonies practicing his silat, he figures he’ll take a bus into Jakarta and try to get a job teaching it, see how that goes. But he gets sidetracked.
Before Wilson Yip directed Donnie Yen in the IP MAN series the two had already done a bunch of movies together. Their first collaboration was the 2005 crime movie SPL: SHA PO LANG. The title has to do with Chinese mythology and every man’s capacity for both good and evil. That’s hard to translate for Americans so the Weinsteins called it KILL ZONE. It’s about a zone of killing.
