The Fearless Hyena (1979)

Rated R for blood, violence, death, language, and some questionable gender humor...including making light of someone getting sexually assaulted.  When thinking back to what made this movie kinda / sorta questionable, I had a hard time (outside of the Jackie Chan in drag sequence).  It doesn't feel that bad, but it would be enough that I wouldn't want to show my kids this movie.  There are parts that they would love and the humor is aimed at their age.  But there are some questionable  moments, so R.

DIRECTOR: Jackie Chan (as Jacky Chan)

I gotta be honest with you, kids.  I 180'ed on this movie pretty hard.  I really want to love Kung Fu films.  There's something so impressive about them while simultaneously being incredibly campy.  If you asked me about The Fearless Hyena, that absolutely is the best summary of what I just watched.  I should be able to close this blog off right now given that description, but I can't.  I gotta fill the space.  The problem with Kung Fu movies is that I want to vibe with them and then mostly don't.  The first day of watching The Fearless Hyena, I thought that the movie was straight trash.  It was almost a burden to watch it.  The second day?  I realized that I had a notion completely wrong when I came to watching these films.

The Fearless Hyena has a couple strikes against it.  Jackie Chan is incredibly talented and likable.  That being said, he's incredibly immature and often goes for low-hanging fruit when it comes to comedy.  Listen, I'll laugh at a good fart or sex joke.  It's just that...these aren't good jokes.  They're wacky.  It almost feels like you are watching a Looney Tunes cartoon at times in the movie.  I always said that if you have a wacky soundtrack because you are a comedy, something went horribly horribly wrong.  There shouldn't be wacky soundtracks.  The music shouldn't be the thing that's covering for the lack of laughs.  A lot of the first act is that kind of stuff.  It's spit takes and double takes done to goofy foley effects.  It's actively not good.  But the second thing that hurts this film --at least in my first day of watching this --is that there is no real story. Honestly, it bugged me.  It bugged me so much.  To a certain extent, it still bugs me.  I'm watching for the better part of an hour nothing but a variation on the same scene.  Shing Lung dresses up as a character.  He fights a dude.  It's funny.  Repeat.

And normally, there's only so much that you can handle of that.  I was in that camp.  And even though I ended up liking the movie by the end, there were some of those fights that were borderline tedious.  I was actually talking about this in class today.  I didn't really like seeing Vegas shows, most notably Cirque de Soliel, because the initial fright and suspense of acrobatics diminishes the more we see of that trick.  It's the magician repeating the same trick over time.  It gets a little less impactful.  

But my big takeaway, given some distance from it, is that Jackie Chan is the guy who does one thing incredibly well.  Honestly, The Fearless Hyena is a half-hour movie.  It starts in the last half-hour and that is a film that exists in itself. If you had to have push come to shove, the entire first hour and change is world building and character.  We have to get how intense Shing Lung trains and that he is inferior to his old grandfather.  He's a little bit of a con man, but in a charming way.  And that's all that there really is to know.  The lion's share of the movie is Shing Lung making a quick buck working at the school.  But the big pull from this, narratively at least, is that his gaming the system inadvertently gets his grandfather killed.  It's the lesson that the character is supposed to learn.  But even that is a bit of a stretch mainly because the bad guy is the real guy who gets his grandfather killed.  It's kind of hilarious how much cinematic real estate that the film exhausts before it actually gets to anything resembling a plot.

But here's the deal.  Here's the epiphany I had.  Maybe we don't have to expect everything to be amazing.  But Jackie Chan, as an artist --however you want to define that word --does one thing better than anyone else.  The fact that he's stuck forming a narrative around an excuse to do the most incredible fight choreography is impressive.  That's something that I should be celebrating instead of lamenting.  When Jackie Chan was dominating American films in the late '90s and early 2000s, he made fight choreography both impressive and hilarious. When I watched the first two movies in the box set, we got hints of greatness.  I saw a young Jackie Chan who was being experimental as heck while trying to make a funny movie.  But what I got here?  Outside of the story and film being only so-so, I don't know if I've ever seen such creative and impressive fight choreography.  The scene that sold me?  The pots and bowls on the ground scene. Here's the deal. 

Jackie Chan was the king of the blooper real in his American heyday.  We saw how all of these fight sequences occasionally failed.  I know the amount of work that goes into making these scenes work.  While watching that bowl scene, even with the thoughts on how these scenes are filmed, I was flummoxed how he pulled it off.  I must be the only one impressed by this because I could not find the clip on YouTube.  I found a million other clips from the movie.  But the one that impressed me?  Not there.  Maybe I'm impressed by very specific things.  But that's what we're seeing.  

I now know that Jackie Chan is one thing.  If this was the culinary world, he made the world's best croissant.  People come from all around to just try the croissant.  Of course, there are other things on the menu.  Some of the things are fine.  Some of the things are not good.  But it doesn't matter.  You come for the croissant; you should enjoy the croissant.  Once I figured out that part, the movie became fun.

But this leaves me analyzing a fraction of a movie.  If the fight choreography is artistry, then the rest of the movie must be broken down.  It's so odd because the real inciting incident happens near the end of the movie.  The death of the grandfather is the motivation for the actual plot: how to defeat Yam Tin-fa.  And I'll say, while it is some low hanging fruit for emotional connection, it mostly works.  But the crux of the story depends on Shing Lung mastering his emotions.  Is it all that impressive if Shing Lung learns to study his emotional state (which is tied to the title of The Fearless Hyena) only 20 minutes before the final confrontation?  Again, this is only a fragment of a movie.  That fragment is pretty good, but it's not fair to give all of this value to an incredibly rushed storyline.

So I enjoyed it.  It does the job.  I don't hate the idea of watching part two pretty soon.  What this is happens to be very specific.  What is there is pretty fantastic.  But the rest is almost not a movie.