Dragon Fight
Director: Billy Tang
Year: 1989
Rating: 6.5
During his two
year hiatus in San Francisco, Jet Li made this film and one other. Though
in many ways this is a standard low-grade action/martial arts film, it has
some factors in its favor. The prime one being a first rate cast. First
of course there is Jet in an early film before he became a big star, but
there is also Dick Wei, Stephen Chow and Nina Li. This is also an early performance
for both Chow and Nina. Chow shows an early indication of his ability to
mix both comedy and drama here. Nina manages to look fabulous needless to
say.
This is definitely
one of those types of weakly written scripts with more coincidences than
days in the month. That sort of thing can be fairly annoying, but the basic
premise of two lifelong friends turning against one another is always a good
sell in my book. On top of that, there are some very good fighting sequences.
Both Jet and Dick are members of a Chinese National performing team and are
in San Francisco. Stephen Chow is attending the show and later gets the autograph
of Jet. As the team prepares to depart at the airport, Wei decides to defect.
He tells Jet – “why are we doing this – we get nothing, but a can of soda
for our work.” Jet tries to persuade him to stop, but ends up giving Wei
his wallet with money in it and bids him good luck. The two have been best
friends since childhood and members of the team for years.
Wei immediately gets accosted
by a cop and in the ensuing fight kills him and accidentally drops Jet's
wallet. Jet meanwhile has missed the plane and is arrested for murder. Later
the car escorting him crashes and Jet escapes and runs into Chow who takes
him in. Wei joins up with a ruthless triad and becomes their number one killer.
The film has a good sequence in which it quickly goes back and forth between
Wei efficiently knocking off the rivals of his boss and Jet and Chow bonding
as friends. Nina comes into the film first as the sister of a friend of Jets
and later as the mistress of Wei’s boss. Many coincidences later, Jet and
Wei find themselves on the opposite side of one another and they have to
decide how important an old friendship really is. This leads to a lengthy
excellent fight at the end of the film. The film has a number of good non-wire
fights. For the most part this is a decent low budget film with the added
attraction of an excellent cast. Perhaps not a film that a non Jet Li fan
would want to run down, but certainly worth the effort for his fans.
