Iceman I & Iceman II

 
     
Iceman
Director: Law Wing-cheong
Year:  2014
Rating: 4.0

There is enormous excitement in the air with Iceman: The Time Traveler coming to Bangkok this month. Buddhist monks have been enlisted to perform a cleansing ceremony at the film's opening to exorcise any bad press or worse acting from the film. It is a rarity for a Hong Kong film to make the long haul over the mountains and jungles of South East Asia and when they do they are usually dubbed into Thai. That would of course be a travesty and be injurious to the delicate acting talents of Donnie Yen and the other fine actors who no doubt are in this film. Dubbing into Mandarin is one thing, but into Thai is a step too far. Now the excitement is of course because this is the long awaited sequel to Iceman that came out in 2014. People have been waiting for this anxiously like your next meal at McDonalds - not as long as waiting for the Star War sequels but with nearly the same obsession.





So with this in mind I watched the DVD of Iceman and now I understand the fever pitched repressed need of the fans. This film is a set up for the sequel. It ends clearly with a cliffhanger of sorts like an old fashioned serial. Just as it was going to finally get good (I am sure) it ends and fans had to wait four long tormented years for this to open. Well, actually the sequel was wrapped up not long after the first one - perhaps done at the same time - but those wily producers decided to make us wait and allow the crescendo to build. Great marketing. Ok, perhaps the fact that this film bombed under a barrage of bad reviews had something to do with it and the four year interval was in hopes that everyone had forgotten the first film. They probably should have waited another four years or as in the film 400 years as Iceman: The Time Traveler has been as big a disaster as the Gallipoli campaign. 75% of voters on a Chinese website gave it a 1 ranking because 0 was not available. Even so, I don't get to see HK films on the big screen very often unless Jackie Chan is in them so I hope to make it. My guess is I will have to get there quickly before it disappears like a fleeting fart in the wind.






I make that crude reference because Iceman gives us not just one, but two fart jokes with Donnie Yen smiling both times as if he has won the Nobel Peace Prize. It is that sort of movie. Bad in so many ways you would need Shakespeare to count them.  But let me give it a try. This owes a debt of gratitude to the 1989 film The Iceman Cometh starring Yuen Biao, Maggie Cheung and Yuen Wah as it takes the basic premise and crushes it under the heel of incompetence. Iceman Cometh should be suing for damages. Back in the Ming Dynasty He Ying (Donnie Yen) is falsely accused of aiding the Japanese pirates and when he escapes with two of his once loyal men, Sao and Nie Hu, after him in pursuit, they get caught up in a snowstorm and are frozen alive until they are found and delivered to Hong Kong by Lam Suet 400 years later. Where upon of course the truck carrying them crashes and they are let loose on modern Hong Kong and undiscerning film goers. There is also some gobbledygook about The Golden Wheel of Time that allows time travel if you have Shiva’s (Hindi God) "enormous" penis to insert in it. And Donnie has had it in his hand for 400 years keeping it warm and hard.





Now it starts getting silly. It appears that warriors from the Ming days have enormous powers – not quite Thor like but more than say Captain America. They can jump long distances and pee even longer – yes we also get two marathon pee scenes and of course they can knock down walls with a punch. He Ying has no trouble adapting to Hong Kong riding on the top of double-decker buses and eating noodles. When someone jokingly shoots a toy arrow at him he catches it in his teeth and May (Eva Huang) who is out cavorting and canoodling with her PR friends (i.e. hostess girls) immediately falls in love. I mean a man who can catch a flying arrow in his teeth – what else can he do with that mouth? The two men after him meanwhile fall in love with Curry Chicken (well so do I actually) and booby magazines. Simon Yam as a corrupt cop is after all three and the Wheel and the penis as well. Poor Simon.





The film is filled with corny nitwit jokes, insanely exaggerated wire-work, a puffy looking Donnie Yen, dreadful fights, worse dialogue and so on. And weirdly no one in Hong Kong seems to be particularly surprised that there are these three guys from 400 years ago who are creating havoc. I guess they all saw The Iceman Cometh and are used to it by now. Oh, another super powerful Ming Dynasty warrior from the past. Ho-hum. I have not seen many HK films made after 2010 as I went into a HK film coma but I really hope this is not indicative of their quality. This clearly had a big Mainland budget behind it (and if that set piece on the Tsing Ma Bridge was legit it was pretty impressive) but the best thing about it is the aerial shots of Hong Kong and the use of location shooting but please put some time into a script that makes sense and makes you care about the characters.





The most emotion shown is when May recounts how sad she was when she first moved to Hong Kong from the Mainland and people made fun of her because she spoke Mandarin – so much so she pretended to be an Overseas Chinese! Oh my God! I expected her to end her soliloquy by adding “This was a public service announcement”. Also on the plus side for me was so many familiar faces – Donnie, Simon, Lam Suet, Eva who I recall from her debut in Kung Fu Hustle as well as two older actors who I always liked – Bonnie Wong who plays May’s mother and the square-faced scary Lo Fan who was in a bunch of female triad films and was Bull Dyke in Gigolo and Whore II. A face you can’t forget. Hopefully I can with this film but first Iceman: The Time Traveler!




Iceman 2: The Time Traveler
Director: Raymond Yip
Year:  2018
Rating: 5.5



This arrived in Bangkok this week surrounded by a legion of Ming warriors to protect it from the knives and arrows of stinging critics and angry film fans. Back home in China and Hong Kong it was not treated well - they basically flushed it down the toilet like a dead rodent. Having seen the first film I wasn't at all surprised as that was pretty awful. Though this sequel was shot around the same time as the first film, the fact that it was released five years later is rarely a good sign. Clearly from the ending of this one, they had hopes and prayers that they had a franchise on their hands - and who knows - maybe in five years we will get another time travelling tale sneaking into theaters.



But I will go against the tide of every opinion I have come across - critic or fan - and say this isn't the worst film ever made as some have claimed - in fact it is a big improvement over the first film and that should not be surprising with a change of director and scriptwriter to two veteran Hong Kongers with a solid resume behind them. At the helm this time is Raymond Yip with films like Portland Street Blues, The Warlords and Bruce Lee, My Brother to his credit – not to mention the classic I am Your Birthday Cake! And credited with the script is Manfred Wong who has been around in various roles for decades. And in fact the script is much better as he slows it down, gives it a purpose and adds some needed melodrama and pathos to it. The wire-fu which was on meth in the first film is brought back to earth and kept in a cage and let out on only a few occasions.



Till the end that is – the end gets nutty and weird but still how can I complain about Donnie Yen having a lengthy sword duel with the great Japanese actor Kurata Yasuaki across time and space. Now this is not a recommendation by any means – but I have sure seen a lot worse HK films in my time – so I am puzzled by the hate poured down on it like it is causing genocide. Maybe it is a budget to outcome equation – both films had large budgets – probably enough to make five good independent films in Hong Kong – but that is always a fallacious argument. The money would have just gone elsewhere. Or maybe for Hong Kongers the film went irreversibly bad for them early on when Donnie saluted a portrait of Mao as his car rode by – I can imagine that made some want to vomit – I was shocked myself as there was no point to it other than a suck up – yes the character is from the Ming Dynasty and perhaps doesn’t know about the Cultural Revolution or the millions that Mao killed or his liking for underage virgins but we do – come on Donnie I know the Mainland is where the money is but was that really necessary?



If you recall the first film, Donnie and two others are frozen back in the Ming Dynasty and thawed out in modern times – end up in Hong Kong – and Donnie finds out that he was framed for treason and that his entire village including his mother and girlfriend were slaughtered in reprisal. And it turns out that the cop that is played by Simon Yam also came from the Ming Dynasty – all four of them were once friends from childhood – but how he got to HK and became a cop long before the other three is glossed over. Now Donnie wants to go back to the time just before that all happened and change history and save his family. He has to take May (Eva Huang who keeps reminding me of Athena Chu - which is a good thing) from the first film with him (and after a quick stop on a train during the Republic to kick some Japanese off of it) but time and fate are tricky and whatever he seems to do keeps taking him back to the same point of tragedy. To some degree the film is a mess but it is an ambitious mess and it never quite clicks but it isn't the end of movie going as we know it either.