Ask Western moviegoers to name a Hong Kong film actor
and those who could do so would likely answer either Bruce Lee or Jackie
Chan, both known for martial arts and action. Lee's success likely paved
a path for Chan, although the film-types and screen personas for which
each is known are distinctive. Where Bruce Lee kicked high, Jackie Chan
kicks low. Lee broke through walls with a single punch, Chan hurts his
hand when he strikes a wall. The former was serious, the latter is a
comic. Jackie Chan is, in effect, an anti-Bruce Lee, a conscious and
calculated polar opposite.
Notwithstanding the expectations of a martial arts
audience, new dragon Donnie Yen's Legend of the Wolf (1997) feels like
an elegy for a time when kung fu films reigned. Reasons include Yen's
renowned martial arts skills and love of showing them on film; the
movie's non-stop action, meaning high body counts, which re-creates the
genre; and, the nostalgic framing device, which 'remembers when.' Yen
yearns for 'the human content, by which I mean, you feel that real
people, rather than special effects, are responsible for the action.'
But neither an ideology of kung fu as 'mythic narratives of
individualist male triumph over large corporate systems of control and
exploitation' nor a view that it is an 'experimental form which escapes
from representation by offering a purely kinetic ballet of sights and
sounds' can be sustained in the face of intensified economic
conglomeration. Yen's picture is a stroll, or rather, a tear (a race)
and a tear (drop), in this instance, down memory lane.
