Badges of Fury
Director:
Wang Ziming
Year: 2013
Rating: 3.5
I feel like I just spent 90-minutes in purgatory.
With some great martial art legends. But in a way that made it all the worse.
So much talent for so little. This is a fifty-car pile-up on the highway
to Hell. What a mess. Ah, Jet Li. Did Nina Li need a new house? What were
you thinking? Li has been in some of the best films ever in Hong Kong, a
remarkable martial artist when he was younger. But age and injuries creep
up on all of us on small tiptoes. His films after 2000 were becoming
more dependent on wires, CGI, doubles and clever editing. His Chinese films
in particular took on these traits and were fantasies in which CGI took control
and Jet Li was a backdrop. This film in a directorial debut by Wang Ziming
is a lesson in how badly the Mainland is at making these sorts of CGI films
- overdoing it so excessively that you just want to scream, stop I want to
get off. But in theory this is not a fantasy - but sort of a contemporary
cop-comedy-wuxia-mystery film. And it is all bad.
A few people have died with a smile on their
face - one (Michael Tse) while dancing with his large partner who lands on
top of his head after flipping some 20-feet up into the air, another while
diving at a competition and two others. A trio of cops (Jet Li, Wen Zhang,
Michelle Chen) begin investigating and discover that a TV actress Liu Jin
(Cecilia Liu-Shishi) had been engaged to all four of them and her sister
Dai Yiyi (Ada Liu-yan of the ample bosom) stole all of them from her sister.
Sounds ok. Right? A murder mystery. But enough of that - it is absurd - but
the most pain generated from the film is simply its style - everything is
exaggerated and ridiculous.
Jet to his credit stays off screen as much
as possible and leaves it to Wen Zhang. Zhang has become something of a big
deal in Mainland films with Stephen Chow's Journey to the West: Conquering
the Demons as Tang Sanzang. I will do everything in my power to avoid him
in the future. More irritating than Natalis Chan in a funhouse. His attempts
at comedy are soul-sucking. But where
this goes tragically wrong is the action and damn if it wasn't choreographed
by Corey Yuen. Yes, the great Corey Yuen. He seems to have been infected
by the Mainland style of action. Or he did as he was told to. There really
isn't an authentic moment of action in the film. It is all wires and CGI
- men jumping 30-feet up or 20-feet back when hit - of heads crashing through
walls and windows to no ill effect, running on top of heads in a crowd scene,
of editing faster than Superman. It is closer to a cartoon than to real action
- and what a shame.
Jet has three match-ups. One against Ngai
Sing (Bodyguard from Beijing) in a cameo, another against Wu Jing in a cameo
and finally against Bruce Leung Siu-leung. This could have been three classic
fights - admittedly Jet wasn't really up to it - but even so there are a
few moments in these fights that hint at what they could have been - but
the overuse of wires is horrible. Also in cameos are Leung Kar-yan and Stephen
Fung in fights - and Josie Ho and Lam Suet. Maybe I am overreacting
negatively to this. but it is Jet Li and he always deserves better than this.
