Once Upon a Time in China III (1992)

Rated R and that makes no sense to me.  This is the least R-rated R movie I've ever seen.  Here's me stretching to figure out where the shift happens.  Yeah, people die.  But very little of it is really all that gory.  There is one scene where Clubfoot gets his leg broken and that looks pretty gnarley.  There's some cursing, including the f-bomb.  But it actually doesn't happen as much as you think it would.  Honestly, this might be that example that we've all been waiting for to prove how many times you can use the f-bomb...even if it is only a subtitle.

DIRECTOR: Hark Tsui

I've been waiting in my classroom for students because students asked for help with something.  I don't think that they're showing up.  So here I wait, putting the opening paragraph on my blog before I have to leave in six minutes.  This is my life.  

I both don't hate this movie and also think it is a hot mess.  90% of this movie contributes nothing to the overarching story.  It makes a lot of sequel mistakes.  The action sequences are too ambitious and come across as a visual nightmare.  But if you don't care --honestly, don't care --it's mildly fun.  The part of me that likes everything just embraced the fact that this wasn't going to be one of the masterpieces of the Criterion Collection and is only on Criterion because the whole box set is in the Criterion Collection.  Like, honestly, let's really start breaking down this movie and how it is almost absolutely a train wreck of a film that I didn't hate watching.

Let's talk about the one thing that this movie could have been.  Here I am, watching this movie for an hour, and I'm wondering what the big threat of the movie is.  Like many of the kung fu films that I've watched, there's a standard story about feuding kung fu schools / dojos.  Like, I've now seen so many movies where there is an evil kung fu school that just doesn't mind murdering the good kung fu school.  The crazy thing is that I can almost hear the producers phoning in this script.  From moment one, Chiu Tin Bai (I think I got the right character) just comes across as super evil.  He smashes other schools and intimidates the neighborhood.  I mean, I can't really throw stones.  I mean, gangster movies about Italian Americans are fundamentally the same things.  So as a threat to Wong Fei-Hung?  There isn't much there to really explore.  Like, he's done incredible things in the first two movies.  Sure, there's a deeper plot that is really shoehorned into the final act to give this movie stakes.  But the threat to this movie is so small and so almost arbitrary that it almost feels like there isn't really a threat to Wong Fei-Hung.  At no point di I think that Chiu Tin Bai was going to do any kind of real damage to this franchise.  Heck, at one point, we almost thought that maybe 13th Aunt (it's easier for me to type and I hate myself for that) could have gotten hurt and I almost got mad at the movie for implying that this stupid threat could have done anything.

And the frustrating thing is that this movie almost hit a story worth exploring: Clubfoot.  Ultimately, a lot of this movie was an attempt to squeeze water out of a stone when it came to character.  But the only thing that could have been a new exploration is how Wong Fei-Hung treats someone that is aggressively an enemy.  Clubfoot is Jaws, specifically from Moonraker.  He is that henchman that far-and-away shames every other henchman that comes around.  He has a look to him that even stands out in a crowd.  (While Jaws is intimidating, Clubfoot holds himself close to the ground, ready to pounce.)  Yeah, Wong Fei-Hung is a better fighter because Wong Fei-Hung is surrounded by plot armor.  But Clubfoot goes beyond just holding his own.  Like, Wong Fei-Hung has to break a little bit of a sweat fighting this guy.  And there's this fantastic beat where Clubfoot loses the only thing that gives him value.  His leg is broken so badly that he's considered permanently out of commission.  In the matter of only a few minutes of screentime, his own kung fu school starts ridiculing him and shaming him, even though he did more damage than any of those other bozos.  He goes into a shame spiral and ends up on the doorstep of Wong Fei-Hung.  And in this moment, Wong Fei-Hung shows him compassion, offering to heal his leg at no cost.  He even goes to this great place saying that the two of them can fight once Clubfoot is healed.  Clubfoot initially rejects the offer, shamed by the mercy shown by his enemy.  

And Clubfoot eventually learns to change as a person and become an ally to a man he once hated.  Do you know what would have been great?  All that I just wrote?  Maybe three minutes of screen time.  This could have been a movie about redemption and seeing humanity in the most surprising places.  This could have been about a journey involving forgiving oneself and understanding people are far more complex than the archetypes that these movies have been about.  But the Clubfoot stuff?  All afterthoughts.  It was an excuse to get another fighter on the side of Wong Fei-Hung.  It's so frustrating because that's a story!  That's a real story that would have made this movie not just fun, but honestly pretty darned good.  

Because --and this is what I have been dancing around --this movie offers almost nothing new to the franchise.  The first movie is complex and challenging.  For a movie that is an excuse to do some well-filmed wire-fu, it talks about the dangers of losing tradition and offers some admittedly propagandized takes on international realtions that might not be completely inaccurate.  And, yeah, there's a lot of people punching each other and doing absurd jumps.  But even in Once Upon a Time in China II, the progress that Wong Fei-Hung makes is superficial.  That's the sequel crime that always bothers me so much in sequels, when the protagonist undoes all of the internal conflict stuff that they learned in the first movie.  (The most heinous example of this is Kevin McCallister from Home Alone to Home Alone 2)  But the entire first movie is about Wong Fei-Hung admitting his feelings about 13th Aunt and being open about that relationship.  But each movie has been a reset for that plot.   It seems like 13th Aunt remembers all of the trials and tribulations that they've been on, but Wong Fei-Hung is acting like this is all new information.  When I'm seeing this same plot line for the third time, it means nothing to me.  He's probably going to do this thing in Once Upon a Time in China IV.  I mean, it's so dependent on the character having the same flaw over-and-over that it can't think of another flaw that Wong Fei-Hung could have.

Can we talk about something being a valiant attempt without success?  Again, a Lion King tournament means nothing to me.  I don't get the value of these things outside the fact that it's kind of pretty?   But I don't get why there's this obsession with how violent these things get.  Okay, I don't get it.  But I don't like watching sports that I understand.  Imagine having to get invested in a sport that I don't know the rules for.  Now, you can blame me for this all you want.  That's not the point.  What I'm bothered by is that there are a lot of fight-to-the-death Lion King tournament sequences...and they are just too much throughout.  I have never been a fan of Transformers in any format.  But that Michael Bay movie drove me insane because it was a lot of metal CG just hitting each other.  I had no idea who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.  It was visual overload.  That's what these Lion King tournaments are.  There is so much on screen and I can't really make heads or tails of what I'm looking at.  I understand that there's an insane amount of choreography going on screen, but it looks like unstructured chaos and I don't care for it.  

That plot with the Russian at the end is straight up lazy, by the way.  The previous entries had commentary about foreigners taking advantage of the Chinese.  But to have a love triange started with 13th Aunt only to make him sinisterly evil is just dumb.  Also, that plot at the end doesn't even make all that much sense.  It seems overly complex for no real reason.  I'm sure that there are easier ways to assassinate someone.  It's just dumb.  

Still, I don't hate watching these movies.  They are very pretty and there's some impressive choreography.  This one is a low point, but it's still incredibly watchable.