Director: Jet Li
Year: 1988
Rating: 6.0

Of all the Jet Li films that I have seen this would have to be considered the most brutal of them. At the same time though, there were definite aspirations to create a very dramatic framework in which to build this grueling action around. It is undermined though by its virulently anti-American sentiments and the simplistic contrast it creates between good and evil. There are no gray areas here. The Americans are portrayed as complete and utter swine. I am not sure if this film was funded in the Chinese Mainland, but it certainly has a very propagandistic flavor to it. The Nationalistic troops are not depicted in any more of a positive light than the Americans are. Jet Li directed it but according to Bey Logan’s HK Action Cinema there were numerous production problems and that Tsui Siu Ming had to take it over. Tsui is also credited with the action choreography. You may have seen him as an actor in a few films like Bury Me High or The Buddhist Fist. Certainly Jet has not directed a film since this attempt.

The film begins at the end of WWII and Jet’s platoon is involved in a ferocious fight with the Japanese army. Then suddenly the war is over and Jet is on his way back home. At home he meets up with an older army comrade, Zhang, who had once saved his life in the war. Zhang tells Jet that his daughter is dead, but in fact she has become a prostitute and Zhang has disowned her. The US Navy has taken up residence in the town and they are the scum of the earth – running over the locals, showing no respect for anything or anyone, raping the women etc. I know they were no boy scouts, but it is so overdone that the film loses a lot of its intended dramatic impact. 

Jet (his name in the film as well) needless to say takes offense and gets into a number of fights with them. These fights are incredibly brutal and at times difficult to watch. There is no stylish acrobatic wire-fu going on here - just toe to toe, face to face beating. He gets into the boxing ring a few times with them and gets pulverized – though he gets in a few good whacks of his own. Then a giant of an American takes a disliking to him and they have a match - no gloves - anything goes -  and it is ten minutes of just beating the hell out of each other. Nothing fancy - just bang bang bang. At one point Jet gets tossed out of the ring and then out of the bar through a glass window. But he comes back for more. It then turns into a bar room brawl between the Americans and the Chinese that was all hands on deck. Later he and the American go at it again in a factory in a lengthy fight - astonishingly brutal and some amazing stunt work with fall after fall. During all this, Jet and Zhang’s daughter (Song Jia) become attached to one another. It was actually some of the little dramatic bits that I liked here – this relationship, the one between Jet and Zhang and then the reconciliation between father and daughter. It had a real downbeat working class Bicycle Thief feel to it and I was almost wishing that this part of the film would take precedence over the action. 

The American is played by Kurt Roland Pettersson who was a Swedish martial artist. He is huge and towers over Jet like the Eiffel Tower. He was friends and a co-student with Dolph  Lundgren. The two fights with Jet are as hard hitting as anything you will see. Any one of those punches would have killed me and they take a lot of them. Real life was truer than movies though and he seems to have gotten into a fight in a square in Barcelona and his windpipe was crushed and he died. There were no witnesses and the guilty party was never found.

This is an interesting if very flawed film from Jet that is different from anything else he has ever done. Apparently Jet had been very unhappy with his experience in filming Martial Arts of Shaolin and had told people that he was going to leave the movie business and just focus on his martial arts training. So the the producers said he could direct this film. That he chose this subject is interesting. Its failure at the box office helped convince Jet to move to San Francisco for a few years. I would be curious to see what he thinks of it today.

As a note, the production company is Sil-Metropole Organization Ltd. After the Chinese revolution four film companies left Shanghai and set up shop in Hong Kong. All four were considered leftist biased and made many films about social issues. In the 1980’s they all merged to be Sil-Metropole. But they were and still are affiliated with the Mainland and though they are Hong Kong based they were given the same legal status as a Mainland film company. Taking that into account, it is not difficult to see why it depicted Americans and the Nationalists so poorly.