Shanghai Affairs
     
      
Director: Donnie Yen
Year:  1998
Rating: 4.5
Kung Fu Doctor! Saving lives and knocking heads. It would have made a great TV series. But probably not starring or being directed by Donnie Yen. This was the third film that he directed after Legend of the Wolf and Ballistic Kiss and at least he discards all his attempts to be cutting edge, pretentious and experimental and sets it back into a period film for a basic kung fu plot and style. But there is so much wrong here and so little that is right. Just basic things are so clumsy such as the transitions from scene to scene that have so little coherence - the editing of fight scenes and dramatic scenes are rough - a painfully maudlin attempt at creating a romance with a modern mushy ballad thrown it - a plot that is just plain silly and no great fight scenes that are at all memorable. That I suppose was the biggest sin - with a few great fights, one could have forgiven all the rest - but they are all cut short just when they are getting interesting.  You keep thinking he is holding back for a big roundhouse finish but he doesn't really deliver it. Yen wasn't to attempt to direct for another five years and that was for two Twins films which he was not in. And nothing since then. Not really his skillset. Action is.



Donnie Yen trying to do Dr. Kildare was a bad idea from the get-go - even Dr. Kill-Dare would have been a bad idea. This must have been his idea to broaden his acting chops - put on a mask and handle a scalpel - and look worried when he hands out medicines. He and his friend Bond (Woody Chan) set up their practice in a poor ramshackle slum of Shanghai in the 1930s. On their very first day the neighborhood is attacked by the Axe Gang headed by Yu Rong-guang. They start beating up the residents in order to make them leave and first Bond goes to help them and then reluctantly Donnie joins him. Reluctant you see because he is a doctor. But this being Shanghai, both doctors are martial art masters! Into this picture comes Rong-guan's adorable sister played by the adorable Athena Chu, who is mute. Donnie takes one look down her mouth and says there is a knot in your throat - I can fix that. Super Doctor. Yen and Rong-guang keep bumping into one another but they are more dust-ups than real fights until the end. Meanwhile children are being kidnapped and their organs taken.



Yu Rong-guang is a marvelous martial artist whose entire career feels short-shrifted to me. He has been in some excellent films - starred in a couple of them like Iron Monkey and Project S  - but after a flash of top films in the mid-90's he settled into smaller roles for the rest of his career - he deserved better. If you see his name listed in the cast, you can be pretty sure that there will be some decent action.



The Axe Gang may be familiar to many Hong Kong film fans - they were a big part of the great Stephen Chow film, Kung Fu Hustle - and a few other films. Their trademark was using axes to chop off whatever came first. There was actually a real Axe Gang that strode the streets of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s headed by Wang Yaqiao. But the gang was as political as it was larcenous and cruel. Wang was a follower of Dr. Sun, later he was upset when the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek tried to purge the Communists and so he tried to assassinate Chiang but had to flee the city when it failed. He was later captured and executed. He needs a movie.