Fearless Hyena II (1983)

Not rated, but this movie is way gorier than the first movie.  Like, the stabbing deaths are so excessive.  People are bleeding out of their mouths all of the time.  There's an old man who is straight up set on fire and burns to death.  Also, characters you like die horrible deaths.  There's also some Pepe LePew sexual harassment nonsense, which seems pretty standard for these kinds of movies.

DIRECTOR:  Chuan Chen

This is an attempt to get ahead of the glut of movies that I'm seeing over Thanksgiving break.  In the same day, I finished Fearless Hyena II and went to go see Moana 2.  It's bad news that I almost don't want to sneak out to see Wicked because I would have to write about that movie as well.  These are unhealthy attitudes.  I want to see every movie.  So I'm using this down time to sneak in a Fearless Hyena II blog before I'm completely overwhelmed  

I'm so glad that I wrote the first blog the way I did.  My big takeaway from The Fearless Hyena was that it was an exercise in doing one thing very well.  Trust me, this is me being playful with the way I write because the foundation of this blog is "Why did Criterion release Fearless Hyena II in the Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Star box set?"  At first, I thought I was going crazy.  Fearless Hyena II is not a good movie.  I thought I was losing my mind.  This box set was supposed to be celebrating the sheer insanity that a young Jackie Chan brought to his ouevre.  But Fearless Hyena II is a hot mess from moment one to the end of the film.  It was so bad that, when I took a break, I Wikipedia'ed this movie.  I needed to know what was going on and why everything felt off about this movie.  Well, the big thing I learned is that Jackie Chan also hates this movie.  He hated it into it being a bad movie.  It's such a choice.  

See, here's the deal.  Jackie Chan was trying to change his contract before Fearless Hyena II.  He was contractually obligated into filming the sequel to a movie that he made.   He wasn't going to be directing this movie or fight choreographing this movie either.  He was just going to be starring in it.  Okay.  Well, the first studio got mad that he was trying to get out of his contract with them.  So they GOT THE TRIADS INVOLVED!  The Triads.  I feel weird even typing their name into this blog.  Chan hated everything about this movie, mainly because the Triads were making him make the movie.  He finally agreed to finish the film, but he did it with zero effort.  That's the first thing I noticed about the movie, by the way.  I talked a lot about how The Fearless Hyena feels like a passion project to show just how skilled Jackie Chan is when it comes to fight choreography.  Watching Fearless Hyena II feels like the fight choreography was mostly "marking it."  Like, if it wasn't Jackie Chan, you'd be pretty impressed.  But that's the thing that the box set sells.  Jackie Chan, when he puts all of himself into his fight sequences, is borderline unmatched.  Heck, I love the Bruce Lee Box Set, but Jackie Chan's fight sequences are more fun than Bruce Lee's.

The real crime is that Jackie Chan is so divorced from this movie is that he has other people doing the fights for him.  I even read that his replacement pulled the old Bruce Lee trick of slightly altering his name.  Apparently, his fight guy is named "Jacky Chang".  And these people are incredibly talented.  But they aren't Jackie Chan.  It's so shameless, guys.  It's so bad.  To get around from filming, they introduce this thread that Jackie Chan's character, Chan Lung, likes doing things in disguise.  There's no real reason for it narratively.  It's a quirk that they give the character.  But the reality of the situation was that this costume element is an excuse for Jackie Chan to only film half the scenes while his stunt guy does the other scenes in the costumes.  Sometimes these scenes are fight sequences.  Sometimes, they're just scenes that Jackie Chan chose not to film.  And it's really noticable.  Now, this confused me even more because there are side character that I thought were supposed to be Chan Lung.  

Let's pretend that there's a way to make this movie work with doubles.  I mean, it's a pretty low bar when I'm trying to excuse something that was not made out of love.  This is a movie that is made out of spite, which is pretty inexcusable.  But I do want to then break down the rest of the movie.  First of all, this is a sequel in name only, kind of like Troll 2.  The only thing connecting this movie to the first one is that Jackie Chan is in both and there are similar archetypes.  If anything, that might hurt the movie more.  There are so many moments when I thought it might have been an Evil Dead 2 style remake, where part of the movie is remaking the first movie.  It's not.  But I see that Jackie Chan lives with his elderly master / parent who is no longer dead, but will later die a horrible death, inspiring the lazy Jackie Chan to get his act in gear.  But then there's a whole second group of characters who were probably added to the movie when Jackie Chan decided to pull a Wesley Snipes and not show up to the movie.  They have the same dynamic, only one of those guys is an inventor and the other guy is a con man?  It's a lot.  And figuring out how these guys are related is incredibly frustrating.

Part of the biggest failure is that it spends so much time padding out the fact that Jackie Chan is not there that they ignore the part of the movie that needs to be in there.  I had this complaint a little bit with the first movie, but it including the absolutely vital parts of the film that needed to be in the movie.  One of the conflicts of the film is that Ah Tung (I think I have the right guy) is so obsessed with technology to make his life easier that he refuses to learn martial arts.  We know that he's going to have to confront these two jerks who are murdering everyone (Why?  The movie really ignores this motivation).  The biggest problem is that Ah Tung is trained...for two seconds.  He's supposed to be fighting the two greatest fighters who have slaughtered every master that has come along.  Ah Tung is tricked into one fight with a medium challenge bro.  That makes him prepped for the big fight.  Also, Chan Lung doesn't really learn anything to make him a better fighter.  He just...is a better fighter?  It kind of implies that Chan Lung, had he been stuck in a fight with that old guy from the beginning, probably could have won.  That's not a very interesting story.  

There really is no hurtle to overcome.  These two guys are just moderately better than the bad guys.  There's almost a lesson in the movie, when Ah Tung decides to use his tech to help him win the fight.  I would have gotten behind that as a message in the film.  But it's this half-a-thought when it comes to giving a purpose to the story.  Listen, I have complete sympathy for the director trying to make this movie work.  There are times when the film feels gosh darned cinematic.  But he's cobbling together (Early Soviet Cinema style!) footage that he has from this movie and others, including Spiritual Kung Fu. But after seeing something that was so impressive and then this movie comes out, with a sequeled name, how can you not be disappointed?  This brings me back to my original question.  "Why did Criterion release Fearless Hyena II?"

My theory is that Fortune Star made them do it.  When they went fishing for the rights to release Fearless Hyena for this box set, they made them buy Fearless Hyena II for more profit.  But if you were trying to show off the integrity of this young actor who had a talent that no one else did, you release a movie where he phoned it in and put little effort in the project?  It's just a weird move by Criterion.  

Anyway, it's not like the movie isn't fun.  It just isn't good.  Like, almost at all.  It's really weird that they killed Frog, the one likable character in the film, in the most brutal way imaginable.  If you want just an old Kung Fu movie, you got something else to watch.  But it's pretty hot trash pretty much all around.