Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993)

Not rated, which is funny, because I'm fairly certain the other entries --for some reason --are R rated.  This is one that actually kind of ups the content factor.  One, this one is pretty gory.  Not the worst thing that's out there, but it gets pretty rough.  One lady gets decapitated and then the head is desecrated.  There's some mutilation that happens.  That's on top of the normal violence that we tend to see in these movies.    But the insane thing about the whole thing is the sheer amount of animal cruelty in the film.  There's an entire character who punches horses only for the horses to get revenge at the end.  Still, punching horses.

DIRECTOR: Yuen Bun

You know that you can't have high expectations when you get to the fourth movie in a wire-fu franchise.  Geez Louise, I'm so ready to be done.  It sounds like I hate this.  I don't hate this.  Honestly, a different time in my life would have welcomed the entire franchise.  There would have been a whole thing about how I was the only one to watch these movies.  But there are a bunch of things about Once Upon a Time in China IV that are more annoying than they are bad.

The next statement I'm going to say is going to be pretty self-aware.  There's a lot of George Lazenby happening in this movie.  I'm referring to how George Lazenby was the guy who had to replace Sean Connery in the James Bond franchise for On Her Majesty's Secret Service.   The thing about On Her Majesty's Secret Service is that I actually really enjoy that movie.  I don't think that George Lazenby was a terrible Bond.  I do think that he's a bit of a silly human being whose con man attitude towards success borders on gross.  But I do like the film he was in.  This is the entry in the series that recast Wong Fei-Hung.  Jet Li, who is an incredible martial artist, was replaced by Wenzhuo Zhao, is is also --oddly enough --an incredible martial artist.  I wasn't ready for that.  There's an entry in the Jackie Chan box where Chan is replaced by another guy pretending to be Chan.  The problem is, Jackie Chan is the best at what he does.  Apparently, as impressive as Jet Li is, Wenzhuo Zhao is also pretty darned talented and looks enough like Jet Li that there isn't that much mental gymnastics (pun intended) happening to make the story work.  

But it's not just Jet Li who left.  13th Aunt is gone.  And, instead of recasting her like they did with Wong Fei-Hung, they just introduced 14th Aunt...who is very similar in personality and looks to 13th Aunt.  Why, movie?  Why?  The franchise spent three movie really milking every detail between Wong Fei-Hung and 13th Aunt only to potentially tease the notion that she could be replaced by her sister?  I am glad that both 13th and 14th Aunt show up for the next movie, but what were we rooting for?  

There's something very telling about the introduction of 14th Aunt and it feels like the producers of this film were more upset with putting out the immediate fires of actors leaving than they were with the overall story that they had worked to create.  Nothing feels more episodic in the franchise than part IV of this series.  So much effort was put into making sure that the audience didn't feel the loss of the two main actors in the series.  As such --and this is why I talk about On Her Majesty's Secret Service --we get a movie that really tries holding onto formula so badly while forgetting that there's an overall story to tell.  14th Aunt contributes nothing to the story.  Her motivations are simply to go along with the ride.  As such, she becomes the focus of the romantic gaze of this movie.  Honestly, there are two potential love interests for Wong Fei-Hung in this movie: 14th Aunt and the leader of the Red Lanterns.  But we're kind of put in a pickle.  After all, we've been rooting for 13th Aunt and Wong Fei-Hung for so many hours at this point that to simply abandon that for a character dismissal off camera seems rough.  So the issue is that we're not rooting for any member of a love triangle to do anything, which is odd because the formula that the previous movie set up is that there has to be an awkward romance throughout.

And, golly, does that formula hurt the movie.  I keep putting disclaimers in my blogs (which hurts my blog like formula hurts a movie!).  I don't have an emotional attachment to the Lion King Festival.  It clearly means a lot to the Chinese people.  For me?  I don't quite get the emotional obsession with this trope that we keep going back to.  I really didn't love Once Upon a Time in China III.  It's dependence on the Lion King battles was too much and it took away from character.  But because the producers wanted Once Upon a Time in China IV to remind audiences that, despite change, things were exactly the same, we were forced to have a lot of Lion King competition.  It's frustrating, because I don't really see foreigners putting a lot of stock into these competitions, especially when the villains of the piece don't have almost any time to actually comment on intentions.

Much of this movie kind of feels like Power Rangers.  Yes, I'm aware that Power Rangers are Japanese.  I'm not being racist.  But I'm talking about how unimpressed I am by stunts.  Part of this is me.  I've been watching a lot of these Once Upon a Time in China movies.  That's a lot of wire-fu.  The thing that I am discovering about wire-fu is that it can be really impressive or really awful.  When it is used sparingly, it is really effective.  The first Once Upon a Time in China, it took me a while before I realized that this was a full-on wire-fu movie.  Like, there were a couple of real bananas moments.  I think I even griped about that when I was writing the first one.  But now that I've finished Part IV, it's used so much in every scene that nothing really has any stakes.  Anything can happen.  I compared this to Legolas in The Two Towers backwards mounting a horse (that sounds filthy!) to Legolas in Battle of the Five Armies jumping up a collapsing bridge.  I remember the entire audience oohing-and-ahhing when that horse thing happened, wondering how they did that shot.  A bunch of films later, Legolas is hopping up a digital bridge and there's nothing fascinating about it.  He's done so many absurd things that everything at a certain point seems effortless.  It's a bummer.

I don't know what the villains really want in this piece.  There are two sets of villains: the Red Lantern and the Germans.  The Red Lanterns want foreigners out of their country.  That's been a repeated motif in all of these films. But there's a challenge that the lanterns present to Wong Fei-Hung that has almost nothing to do with the story because they still try to kill him after he completes the tasks.  Then there's the Germans.  Is the Lion King competition a repeated try of the last plan to take over China?  If so, why are we even watching this movie?  Why go through all of the ceremony and rigamarole if we're just going to have the German army try to take over the country through military force?  None of it really has any kind of meaning that makes the villains compelling.  We're in the point of the franchise where we're watching exclusively for spectacle.  

I'm a bit tired of these movies.  They aren't terrible.  It's just that they're coming out at an average of more than one a year.  That's too fast.  Something with this scale requires planning and investment.  Instead, they're riding the high of box office success to make more and more of these movies, regardless of quality.  They look like each other, but the quality doesn't matter.