by Meyers, Ric
Meanwhile, by any criteria, 1993 was an important year for Jet Li. On the plus side, it was clear to the entire film industry that he was still very much somebody, even without Tsui. But on the minus side, this was also the year when Jet’s manager was gunned down in an underworld battle for control of the film industry. According to the Hong Kong press, Jet hastily returned to mainland China, ostensibly to seek a divorce from his wife. According to insiders, however, he was waiting for the smoke to clear in Hong Kong. Because of that, his output in 1994 was reduced to “only” three movies — but one of them remains a kung fu classic while the other two were the result of his newfound producing powers.
One of the two was innocuously titled New Legend of Shaolin, in which Jet played Hung Hsi-Kwan, another legendary kung fu character who took the road of vengeance after the Shaolin Temple was betrayed and destroyed. This new movie version, however, also showcased the pubescent martial arts prodigy Xie Miao, who played Jet’s son. Given that this effort was also directed by Wong Jing, things don’t stay sane for long. Soon the Shaolin betrayer becomes super-powered, able to spit poison, and rides all over ancient China in a silver-spiked deathmobile. Besides that, Hung is eventually saddled with a whole bunch of Shaolin kids, all of whom must unite in the very confusing and, ultimately very silly, final battle.
Of a little more interest was The Bodyguard From Beijing, director Corey Yuen Kwai’s Chinese take on the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston Bodyguard (1992). This Asian variation features the sultry Christy Cheung as a rich man’s wife who witnessed a horrible murder and now must be protected from a brutal kung fu killer (powerfully played by Ngai Sing). The beginning of the film is taken up with the staunch mainland bodyguard getting used to Westernized Hong Kong ways. The middle is given over to silly comedy and gunplay, but the last half-hour is solid action, as Jet and Ngai go at it in Christy’s darkened, gas-filled apartment.
Jet’s audience was impressed by his ability to segue from classic kung fu to modern gun play, but no one seemed pleased when it was announced that he planned to remake what was arguably Bruce Lee’s best film, Fist of Fury. The media was in an uproar: sacrilege! And, indeed, when Jet’s more politically correct, revisionist version first came out, the HK box-office returns were weak. But it was immediately embraced by fans in the rest of the world as Jet’s martial art magnum opus. Like Liang’s Legendary Weapons of China, Sammo’s Dragons Forever, and Jackie’s Drunken Master 2, Jet, with the help of director Gordon Chan, immortalized his kung fu at its height.
Jet maintained that his new Fist of Fury, now called Fist of Legend (1994), was more faithful to the source material and more relevant to the times. The differences between the two films were certainly telling. Unlike Bruce, Jet did not have to convince his audience that the Chinese were not the weaklings of Asia. Nor did he think it wise to maintain the rampant hatred of the Japanese that drove the original. Instead, they created both good and evil Japanese, as well as good and evil Chinese. They even added an interracial love story: the hero, Chen Zhen, is in love with a Japanese girl — the niece of a great Japanese sensei (played by the great Shoji Kurata).
But it was the martial arts, choreographed once again by Yuen Wo-ping, which really made Fist of Legend a classic. The film is filled with great fights, each one better than the last. It starts with Chen studying in Japan when a bunch of karate toughs try to force him out of school. He mops the classroom with them, sometimes literally, in a bracingly brutal scene that shows him dislocating jaws and breaking limbs. When Zhen learns that his sifu has been killed in a martial arts duel, he confronts the winner’s students and mops the place with them (at one point flipping a student by his mouth … then slowly wiping the student’s saliva from his fingers). He then tests the man who “defeated” his sifu in a lovely battle in which Chen repeatedly “gets in his face” — showing again and again that the “victor” is not skilled enough to even keep the sifu’s student away.
By personally digging out his buried master’s liver to test for poison, Jet runs afoul of both the enemy students and the racism of his own school’s “brothers.” He must confront his dead sifu’s son, who is murderously envious of Li’s skills. At first he goes easy on him, but Jet soon unleashes a new skill called “boxing” (shades of Born to Defense). Emerging victorious, he is still exiled by his racist superiors in the company of his Japanese lady love. Jet must then face her uncle in a terrific scene that compares and contrasts Asian styles. It ends with the film’s most important dialogue.
After Shoji has called the confrontation a draw in the original Chinese version of the film, Jet asks: “But isn’t the whole idea to win?”
To which Kurata replies: “If you want to win a fight, bring a gun. Martial arts is about balance and inner energy.”
With that, Jet had struck the first blow for a new direction in the Hong Kong Kung Fu Cinema New Wave. But Fist of Legend was not over yet. Jet must still face his sifu’s most virulent enemy (and the real killer): the man known as the General of Death — powerfully portrayed by Billy Chow (aka Chow Bey-lai). Chow also beautifully fought Sammo in Eastern Condors, Yuen in Dragons Forever, and Jackie in Miracle. Now it’s Jet’s turn, and, for fifteen marvelously orchestrated minutes, they go at it with brutal hung gar, taichi-flavored wushu, and even kick-boxing… until Billy grabs a samurai sword, forcing Jet to use his belt the way Bruce used his nunchaku.
Although they can’t bring themselves to kill Jet at the end, ala Bruce (a loophole Donnie Yen would eventually leap through), Fist of Legend ranks with Li’s Shaolin Temple and Once Upon a Time in China II as among the very best of the best. After that, Jet took time to slow down. He had been through monumental changes, and his early wushu teaching was grating uncomfortably against the dog eat dog world of kung fu cinema. Wo-ping had shown him a new way to synthesize fighting — something that didn’t require muscle against muscle, anger against hated, and vengeance against vendetta. But while he considered this, he managed to make two more movies in 1995 — and they were odd, to say the least.
My Father Is a Hero (1995) is Jet and Corey Yuen Kwai’s low-rent version of James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies (1994, which, in turn, was based on a 1991 French film called La Totale). This film reunites Jet with Xie Miao, the pubescent kung fu prodigy from New Legend of Shaolin, and uses the boy to wring pathos from its increasingly out-of-control plot. To push the audiences’ buttons, they bring the kid back from the dead not once, but twice during the frenetic proceedings, and finish up the final fight with Jet using him as a living yo-yo — hurling him back and forth at the villains with a rope!
Also disappointing, but for entirely different reasons, was High Risk (1995) which was reportedly Wong Jing’s attempt to co-star Jet Li and Jackie Chan. But when Jackie dropped out, the film became a vicious satire (read: attack) on Chan, featuring the talented Jackie Cheung as an action star who wears Bruce Lee’s black-striped yellow outfit from Game of Death, has a father and manager who look just like Jackie’s and, to top it off, is a drunk, skirt chaser, and total fraud.
Responding to rumors that it was director Stanley Tong, not Jackie, who did the jump between buildings in Rumble in the Bronx, Jing sets up a similar stunt in High Risk, and then shows how Cheung’s character fakes it — but takes credit for it anyway. From there, the movie piles on — painting Cheung’s character as a sniveling coward to boot — an attribute that even the most negative of Jackie Chan critics can’t ascribe to the superstar. Even so, Jing continues to mercilessly lampoon Willie Chan, Jackie’s manager, and even go so far as to cruelly kill Jackie’s cinematic father. This cruelty really makes High Risk hit a sour note, despite Li’s strong performance as a bodyguard who must save the star, Die Hard-style, from terrorists in a high rise. Despite its title, this mean-spirited effort marks a low point in Jet’s filmography.
By then, however, it was clear even to Jet’s most ardent fans that he was basically just making money in case things went south after Britain’s lease
on Hong Kong ran out in 1997. Black Mask (1996) was a stylish, entertaining action picture, directed by Daniel Lee, that allowed Jet to dress up like Kato. Touted as the most expensive non-Jackie Chan Hong Kong movie ($HK65,000,000), this tale of a top secret government plan to create super-soldiers has plenty of style, kinkiness (the heroine and villainess spend a notable amount of time in bondage), and deja vu (when our masked hero and super-powered super-soldier-supreme adversary slug it out in a gas-filled catacomb).
Jet coasted the remainder of the year in the very odd Dr. Wai in the Scripture With No Words (1996), a troubled movie within a movie. Li plays both a frustrated author, as well as the lead character in the writer’s unraveling story. Although directed by Ching Siu-tung, neither the fantasy nor the reality portions of the effort were particularly riveting. So, with the end of an era fast approaching, Jet had to make a decision about his future. He may have realized that he needed cinematic closure, or they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Whatever the reason, in 1997, Hong Kong’s changeover year, Jet returned to the role of Wong Fei-hung.
“Okay, okay,” Tsui Hark seemingly admitted by producing Black Mask, “Without me, you’re something.” Therefore Jet agreed to star in Once Upon a Time in China VI: The Lion Goes West, aka Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997). It was a cause for celebration for Jet’s fans and a cause for resentment for Jackie’s fans. Not only had Li starred in the insulting High Risk, but The Lion Goes West was a title and concept that Chan had publicly suggested as a project with Francis Ford Coppola. Then, to add injury to insult, Tsui signed Sammo Hung, fresh off helming Mr. Nice Guy, to direct and choreograph.
Apparently, Chan had the last laugh, as word has it that this was an extremely arduous and disorganized production. Jet, Sammo, Rosamund Kwan, and company reportedly tromped all over Texas, filming whatever they could think of as they went along. The finished film reflects the production chaos. Foreshadowed conflicts come to nothing. Main villains are changed midstream. Wong Fei-hung jerks back and forth between fighting bloodthirsty Indians and protecting Native Americans. Characters and subplots are introduced, only to be summarily eliminated.
There is some exciting kung fu, but it is essentially over by the film’s midpoint. Running out of time and money, Sammo and crew hastily patched together a painfully anti-climatic final battle that relies far more on photography than fighting. Once Upon a Time in China and America was only successful if Jet’s purpose was to disentangle himself from the character of Wong Fei-hung. Like Diamonds Are Forever (1971), which Sean Connery used to similarly detach himself from James Bond, Once Upon a Time in China VI made money at the box office, but not much else. Jet Li wrapped up his initial Hong Kong tenure with Hitman (1998), a minor, but enjoyable, action comedy in which a down-on-his-luck martial artist enters an assassination contest.
But then Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, and director Richard Donner came calling. They wanted a powerful Chinese villain for Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), the latest in their series of landmark “buddy cop” films. Supposedly, they first offered the role to Jackie Chan, but he understandably didn’t want to play the bad guy. Instead, he decided to do a riskier little film with no major stars instead … Rush Hour.
When all was said and done, a reporter asked co-star Chris Rock if Lethal Weapon 4 was Rock’s breakthrough role. The talented comedian’s reply was: “I don’t know about that, but I do know it’s Jet Li’s breakthrough role.”
Rock was right. After the original classic’s serious undertones about a grieving cop’s suicidal desire to take greater and greater risks, Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) was that rare animal: a sequel as good as the original. Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), however, was beginning to show signs of wear. Although not as effective as the first two, it held its own through the stars’ charisma and chemistry. But then, sadly, the crew chose to play the fourth installment like one big joke, imbuing every scene, even violent ones, with an off-putting and self-conscious “we’re only kidding” approach.
Every scene, that is, except when the camera was on Jet Li. His intensity and refusal to take his role lightly made every eye in the theater focus on him. Despite the usual ham-fisted editing of his kung fu skills, and the inclusion of a superfluous garrote wire secreted in prayer beads (which disappears midway through the film without explanation), Jet stole the show simply by refusing to belittle his part. While everyone else was cutting up and wise cracking, Li played it straight, even when asked to lose the final fight to Gibson and Glover — a misconceived mess where the two previously smart cops just flail around until they win for no apparent reason. Thankfully, director Donner’s desire just to have fun served as the best possible introduction of America to Jet Li.
Then it was up to the rest of Hollywood to fumble the ball. Lethal Weapon producer Joel Silver tried his luck first, making the same short-sighted, blinkered, standard-operating-racism decision tinseltown always seemed to make. Just as Americans had taken great Chinese cuisine and reduced it to chop suey, the American film industry took great kung fu films, lumped them in with karate and samurai films, and dubbed them all by the patronizing term of chop-socky. And urban audiences liked “chop-socky” movies, so that’s who all “chop-socky” movies would be made for. Romeo Must Die (2000) was Silver’s first foray in Jet power, followed by Cradle 2 the Grave (2003).
Next, the inventive James Wong, best known for his contributions to The X Files TV, and the Final Destination movie, series, tried his luck with the sci-fi-flavored The One (2001), in which Jet got to play both hero and villain. Finally Jet teamed with French film mogul Luc Besson to make Kiss of the Dragon (2001) and Unleashed (aka Danny the Dog, 2005). Each of these increasingly okay films served its purpose — making Jet more assured in both his performing and producing prowess. It helped that he had brought Corey Yuen Kwai along to serve as choreographer and partner.
“If you want to do a more modern-day movie like Romeo Must Die, Kiss of the Dragon, or Lethal Weapon 4, choose Corey Yuen,” Jet told me. “He takes modern style and ancient style and mixes them together.”
But even Corey couldn’t help when Jet turned down the lead role in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. The official story was that he gave up the role to tend to his new wife, the beautiful Nina Li, during a particularly difficult pregnancy. Unofficial stories ranged from a soothsayer warning him off the picture, to his being too insecure in his acting skills to take on such an important and prestigious role.
Whatever the reason, when renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou (who also made 1991’s Raise the Red Lantern, 1994’s To Live, and 1999’s The Road Home, among other classics) came to him with the script for Hero (2002), Jet did not turn it down. Hero is not only one of film history’s best kung fu films, it is one of the great works of cinema, period. Zhang uses this chronicle of China’s first emperor to illuminate the nature of kung fu, as well as the art of movies.
Since it is a series of stories — each identified with a predominant on-screen color — told by an “assassin-killing hero” named “Nameless,” to the Chinese Emperor he supposedly saved, it’s a shame the title Once Upon a Time in China was already taken. Featuring a phenomenal cast including Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen, and Zhang Ziyi, kung fu is rapturously compared to music, calligraphy, literature, and nature, while romance, betrayal, love, passion, compassion, effort, and emotion are wrapped in brilliant mise en scene. And there’s tremendous kung fu too.
“Given that everyone was talking about the fights between Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger,” Donnie told me, “Jet and I wanted to do even better. I mean, after all, we’re the ones who actually know kung fu.” Indeed, their confrontation in a rainy “chess inn” is a stunning fight scene between a sword and a spear, with special effects used to strengthen the symbolism, rather than cut corners.
For the rest of the gloriously beautiful film, Tony Ching Siu-tung served as choreographer. “If we talk about a sci-fi, comic book, or wuxia movie that’s more romantic and where people c
an fly in the air,” Jet told me, “I choose Tony. He’s the best.”
It’s only right, since all the kung fu in Hero is not only great kung fu, but always symbolic of the fighter’s state of mind or inner turmoil. It is also completely suitable in that the plot hinges on the more than a dozen ways to define the Chinese calligraphy of “sword,” ending, as the film does, with a new definition that declares that the most powerful blade is the one that isn’t used.
With that martial art monument making almost two hundred million dollars around the world (despite the delayed, fumbled, misleading American release), Zhang moved on to the season-based, kung fu allegory, House of Flying Daggers (2004), the color-crazed Chinese version of Lion in Winter, Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), and the Beijing Summer Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies — while Jet was ready to take his rightful place in the movie world.
“I think martial arts has many steps, like a building,” Jet told me. “You must climb to get where you want to go. Becoming a good martial artist and becoming a good actor is two different things. I started learning martial arts when I was eight years old, eight hours a day, six days a week, for ten years. Now, twenty-nine years later, I think the top level is ‘no action.’”
So, naturally, he wanted a “no action” action movie. He wanted a film to talk about what he called “martial arts in the heart. What is martial arts and what learning martial arts is really about,” he continued. “Not just the physical but also the philosophy. What martial arts can do to help you understand life. Many think that martial arts is only for use against someone else, for revenge. If you use martial arts only for the physical, you’re afraid a lot. You’re afraid you’ll lose your power, lose your name, lose what makes you feel special. So your biggest enemy is not from outside. It’s from deep inside your own heart. Who’s the enemy? The biggest enemy is yourself.”
