Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997)

Not rated, but there's a fair amount of blood coupled with some pretty 1997 stereotypes in this movie.  There's also a lot of casual, but not-too-intense cursing.  It's actually weird how this movie goes out of its way to have consistent blood.  At one point, there's this guy who is bleeding pretty badly. He falls in a trough of water and the blood just stays there.  Also, if this is your thing, a wolf dies a pretty gnarly death.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR:  Sammo Kam-Bo Hung

I told you this was how the franchise was going to end!  (Okay, I was sure that they would go to America.)  Honestly, if I spent two seconds and just looked at the titles in the box set, I would have seen that they go to America at one point.  Still, I feel pretty good about calling where the story was going to go.  And boy-oh-boy, this movie gets silly.

Now that I'm done with all of them, I don't quite know what to make of the franchise.  I'm in a place, at this very moment, where the last thing that I really want to do is write a blog.  My brain is scattered and I really want to do anything to distract myself.  Having an opinion on a movie that kind of felt like a mild waste of time might not be the thing to distract me right now.  But it is also the thing that is going to give me time later to really wallow about what is going on.  

When I think of the first film, Once Upon a Time in China, there was an almost overly-serious tone for what ultimately a beat-'em-up movie.  There was a bit of geopolitics coupled with a decent amount of mild Chinese propaganda.  It was shot with a sense of scale and choreography that, even though the story got a little silly at times, felt like they were really making something.  I can't help but think of the first Lethal Weapon movie against the other ones in the series.  Still, I can't fault the last film for trying to pull out all of the stops considering that Jet Li had left the franchise two films prior.  But the Once Upon a Time in China series goes from the dangerous Westernization of a country that wants nothing to do with that to what is just ultimately Shanghai Noon, but not as funny.  (I would like to stress that Shanghai Noon wouldn't come out for another three years and I can't help but think that there's some money being owed to Once Upon a Time in China and America.) With this movie, the gulf of misunderstanding between Americans and the Chinese is so large that it's almost comical how the smarmy the Americans come across.  

Like, we have Billy, who is meant to be the avatar for an American audience.  Every major American character in this movie, including the indigenous peoples, treat the Chinese as focuses of their scorn.  There's a great video that shows why people don't think they are racist.  It comes down to stereotypes in movies.  "I can't be racist because I'm nothing like that guy who is so over-the-top racist that no one can possibly match that."  There's a lot of that stuff going on.  It's not that I mind, but considering that I felt like there was something to unpack from the first movie, I now feel like I have nothing to really analyze here.  Maybe that's the connection between the two.  From an American perspective, I looked at a time in Chinese history with a sense of vagueness.  I understood big ideas (stereotypes), but nothing with a sense of nuance.  Instead, we have a movie made by Chinese filmmakers talking about America and all I get are American stereotypes.  That could unpack a lot of the movie for me.  See?  I'm willing to admit my own faults 

My biggest complaint about the film isn't how kind of silly it is.  By this point in the franchise, the sixth film, the stories had gotten less and less rich and had kind of spiraled into what Once Upon a Time in China and America really was: two separate films.  These movies got really bad about finding a throughline narrative.  Instead, the stories got kind of episodic in their own locations.  The film starts off with Wong Fei-Hung and 13th Aunt fighting off the indigenous people (again, broad stereotypes) and Wong Fei-Hung cracking his head on a rock.  Very much in a Saturday-Morning-Cartoon fashion, Wong Fei-Hung gets amnesia and lives with the indigenous people, learning to be one of them. Now, there was actually a moment where I actually hoped we'd get another Avatar / The Last Samurai / Dances with Wolves / Ferngully: The Last Rainforest trope where Wong Fei-Hung learned that the savages that he thought that he was fighting were actually the good guys.  I mean, there's a little bit of that.  He leaves on a note that makes these guys noble (not a new trope in Hollywood).  But instead of learning who he is in a nuanced way (again, the word I'm going to overuse in this blog is "nuance"), he simply cracks his head again on something and all of that work of the first hour comes down to a silly trope that we see in cartoons.  That's a bummer.

It really kind of craps the bed in the second half of the movie.  If there was a throughline between parts one and two, you'd think it would be the evil mayor.  It really looked like the story was going to be that the evil mayor of the town was going to be the big bad and, because Wong Fei-Hung was out of action, that they'd have to get him back on his feet to fight this dude. Nope.  The movie simply introduced a new bad guy at about the hour mark.  And boy, they didn't spend a lot of time developing that character.  The villain of the piece is almost an amalgamation of all of the other villains of the piece, only with a Western bent.  I know that I let my eyes roll into the back of my head with all of the silly wire fu stuff because it's overused (although, this one is way more tame than some of the other entries), but the spurs on his boots as little saws should be fun, but absolutely are incredibly dumb.  Also, their effectiveness keeps on changing.  The first time those spurs are used on a wolf, it severed limbs.  When the spurs cut the deputy's throat, a small cut.  Finally, when the final fight happened, it slightly hurt the bad guy.  I know.  All of this is stupid.  Still, my brain won't shut off.

Can I make a motion that synthesized music can ruin a movie?  Like, when the American music goes down, it is so rough?  I started turning on The Princess Bride because of the score.  The score in this one is rough.

But can I tell you something overall?  I dug the series.  Like, it's so incredibly dumb at times.  The dropoff of quality?  The fact that the story lost any sense of growth?  Still, watching these movies as amazing wire-fu films makes it worth my time.  Sometimes we like stupid stuff and this is one of those times.  Can I recommend it?  Probably to a specific audience.  Still, these movies are dumb fun.