Once Upon a Time in China II (1992)

R and that is possibly the most confusing R-rating that I have ever seen.  This is barely a PG-13 film.  There's some mild cursing.  The most R-rated stuff in this movie is the blood in the final fight.  Admittedly, someone gets impaled.  When I write it out, it sounds pretty bad.  But really, this is 1992.  There were all kinds of movies where the bad guy had a mildly gross death.  It's a lot more tame than the previous entry in the franchise.  But there were a bunch of corpses.  Still, R-rated is R-rated.

DIRECTOR:  Hark Tsui

Okay, I often write how I don't want to write.  I'm borderline depressed and know that no one is going to read this.  I'm really just knocking this out so that I don't have to do this later.  You know what?  Things aren't really that bad.  I have just had better days.  I wish some things in my life were better.  But do you know what this space is reserved for?  Once Upon a Time in China II.  That's what I'm supposed to be writing about so that's what I am going to write about.  

I really think that I need a Masterclass on the very specific politics of Hark Tsui and the Once Upon a Time in China series.  The last film's take on isolationism was incredibly confusing.  This one...while I don't think it is a glowing take on Westerners, definitely places the villainy on the Chinese characters.  I don't know how many times that I have to write this, but I'm always in the camp that all art should be political and openly political.  With Part II, the politics are far more focused.  The bad guys of the piece are a cult whose sole mission, it seems, is to purge China of all foreigners.  As an extension of this philosophy / mission statement, they also kind of want to kill all sympathizers and collaborators with Westerners.  Similarly, they also extort local vendors into paying for protection from the White Lotus cult.  From that perspective, the message of the story is that xenophobia is poisoning the country and that religious extemism is the most deadly threat to China.  Okay, cool.  The last movie dabbled with similar themes.  

But the last movie also went hard against Westerners.  It's not like white people get their butts kissed here.  There is still a n element of the braggart Westerner who treats the people of China as primitives.  That hasn't gone away.  But instead of making white people monsters like the last movie did, they simply come across as simpletons.  So it seems like this franchise went by the way of supporting the West?  It just seems like I have to watch more of these movies before I have a final takeaway of what this franchise is trying to say abotu foreigners.  Again, if I had to make a guess and my life was on the line, I would say that the Westerners are going to become huge buttheads by the next movie.

I had to come to some really harsh truths about myself.   I both think this movie is incredibly dumb and not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.  If I wanted to, I could make this blog one entire gripe about all of the stupid things I saw in this movie.  On the flipside, I also continually told myself, "Hey, this movie is pretty good."  I don't know how it is true, but both statements are absolutely true.  There's a lot of dumb stuff in this movie.  If I presented this movie from a "Cinema Sins" perspective, there would so so many dumb things to list.  I'm still going to talk about those things or else this would be the shortest blog entry that I offer on this page.  But the most important thing about Once Upon a Time in China II is that it is a far more focused movie than the last one.

I mean, not completely.  The last 18 minutes of the movie kind of feel like they come out of nowhere.  In my head, this is a movie about how Master Wong (also now Dr. Wong?) has to fight a nationalist cult who can't be killed.  These guys are going around ruining every scene with their constant attacks and Wong can't stand by and let innocent people get killed.  If you were looking for a purity of story, that's as simple as it gets. Good guy fights evil cult before they kill more people.  Easy peasy.  But it seems like the movie didn't have enough screen time, so the movie added a whole separate plot at the end of the movie where Wong has to fight Nap-Lan, who oddly surplants the most insane villain with a villain that is somehow meant to be a bigger threat?  I didn't quite get why this story was in this movie.  It seemed like we just needed 18 more minutes of movie so they gave us this fight with an evil magistrate or something.  Maybe I just don't know the intricacies of Chinese histories and they were talking about this important historical moment and I just treated it like technobabble.  That's a real option.  I'm not always the smartest guy in the room.

It's weird that I liked the movie as much as I did.  It broke one of my rules.  And I don't even forgive it for it.  Maybe it's because I had such low expectations and I'm tired and probably ignoring very real signs of depression, but I didn't care that the movie broke my sequel rule.  What's my sequel rule, you ask? I'm glad you did because all of this gave me a few more sentences to dump in here.  My sequel rule is that you can't undo the growth that the character got from the first movie.  Wong is one of those protagonist that probably isn't going to lose a fight unless that's the core idea of the movie.  (Like, in Part IV, he's so convinced that he's going to win and then gets trounced?  That's fine.)  Wong's flaw in the first movie is that he's unable to allow himself to be vulnerable around the woman that he loves and keeps calling her "13th Aunt."  But by the end of that movie, the two of them discuss the feelings that they have for each other and the 13th Aunt stuff was supposed to go away.

But that doesn't happen in Part II.  Instead, the character completely backpedals to where he was before.  There's that new apparently unstated tention that the two characters have with each other, only made worse by Foon's worsening crush on 13th Aunt.  I mean, the movie leans pretty heavily into the fact that Foon carries a torch for 13th Aunt and that it is driving Wong nuts.  I'm not sure if there's some kind of long con going on here where the hostility between Foon and Wong progresses, forcing them to become enemies.  I don't get that vibe based on how these movies are kind of laid out, but I suppose it is possible.  Heck, I'll even go as far as to say it would make an amazing progression for this franchine.  I'm pretty sure that there are six movies so we have time to make Foon and Wong hate each other.  I'm sure that Ted Lasso fans don't agree, but I wouldn't hate seeing Foon go the way of Nate the Great.  

One thing that did drive me nuts was the opening.  I will admit that the end of the movie tried to make amends for broken promises made by the opening sequence.  The movie starts off with the head of the White Lotus Clan showing off that he's borderline immortal.  Blades can't cut him.  He can't be burned.  He is bulletproof.  It's kind of insane.  Considering that the movie's protagonist is the greatest fighter ever, that's actually an insane conceit.  It's an unstoppable-force-immovable-object kind of thing.  And if the movie kept with that, that's kind of rad.  It seems like he taught his disciples also to become immortal, so the White Lotus Clan seems unbeatable?  Nope.  Like most movies that offer a too powerful bad guy, these guys are nerfed pretty quickly.  If anything, his disciples have no powers.  But the final fight with the big bad of the White Lotus Clan?  Sure enough, he seems unkillable.  He's not a good fighter, which I found interesting.  But if he's unkillable, I suppose has no reason to learn to fight.  So the apology was in the form that the movie technically only said that the main guy was invulnerable.  But then, like it had to, it made him killable.  NOW!  I WILL CONCEDE!  The way that the bad guy was killed is actually kind of thematically okay.  Having him impaled by his god who granted him powers is super cool.  

But then we got the whole "He was wearing a bulletproof vest."  There has to be a print of this movie where the movie full on embraced the supernatural.  These movies seem supernatural adjacent, so I don't know why it didn't go full-bore supernatural, especially considering that the bulletproof vest doesn't explain, like, 90% of the things that the bad guy could do.  Hey, early '90s wire-fu film?  Stop being cowards.

Maybe I shouldn't force this blog to go any longer.  I'm in the thick of a franchise.  From a perspective of "Is Once Upon the Time in China II watchable?"  I'll give that answer a resounding "Yes."  Heck, I'll go even as far as to say that it might be an improvement on the first film.  Do I hate that they back track the character?  Yeah.  Are the bad guys instantly nerfed?  Yeah.  But the action is good and the story is far more streamlined.  It was a good time.