Mi ni te gong dui (Fantasy Mission Force: Dragon Attack, Jackie Chan - Fire Dragon) is a 1983 action martial arts fantasy movie directed by Hong Kong action filmmaker Kevin Chu, previously featured in the blog for directing the classic Golden Queen's Commando (1983). It was written by Wei Hsin and is known for featuring Jackie Chan in a somewhat small role alongside Brigitte Lin, Adam Cheng, Jimmy Wang Yu and Jing Fang.
The film is a typical "men on a mission" story with a ragtag group of misfits enlisted by the Allies to rescue some unorthodox generals kidnapped by Japanese forces in this fantastic and anachronistic version of WWII. The team finds a gang of cannibal Amazons, ghosts and the Axis army on their way.
You can tell this is a Kevin Chu movie because of the delirious and fragmentary narrative, the collection of genre movie elements put together in a rather impressionistic and non-coherent matter, as well as a disregard for copyright laws since this movie features stills of Snake Plissken, Rocky and Roger Moore as James Bond in a scene. Everything is just a jumble of crazy fights and nonsensical slapstick comedy done in an action movie fashion with enough blood and sexuality to make it mature but silly enough to entertain all audiences.
While Jackie Chan is considered to be the star and has top billing in some internet sites, the reality is that it is Brigitte Lin the one who steals the show, playing Lily, a tough girl with a grenade launcher and a black jacket. She kicks everyone's butts and has to save the day in just about every other sequence. Lin had previously played Black Fox in Golden Queen's Commando and her character has a cameo in the film as one of the possible heroes who can pull off the dangerous mission but it is said that she quit and started a family, pretty funny. Unfortunately she doesn't make it to the end, a lot of characters don't, but she is the shining light of an already curious movie.
There are a lot of very dynamic and fun battle sequences involving several acrobatic feats caught on camera and perfectly staged to make the stunts shine. There are many memorable stretches such as when Lily pulls one of her trick contests at a bar at the beginning of the film, shooting the dress off a tied up girl, as well as a whole middle section with the male characters trapped by an all-female army that ties people down with cloth and is lead by a guy in a tuxedo with his wife. The final battle with the Nazis is also awesome. There's very little in between that doesn't work either so i would say that this is a well balanced and always fast-moving picture.
Very recommended for Hong Kong action movie fans, this is one of the weirdest and most delirious films in the canon and with its good stunts, starpower and constant crazy scenarios it will entertain for all of its length.
Spacehunter is a silly sci-fi 3D movie that follows Wolff, a hero trying to rescue three women lost in a dangerous planet, he faces mutants and several other menaces. It's kind of a male fantasy, featuring one sole man saving three women who really dont do much in the movie besides screaming and being pushed around and abused (the movie has a reputation of being misogynistic), but you wouldn't expect any less from these nonsensical older movies that never claimed to be real nor sensitive to begin with. The Han Solo-like protagonist teams up with a small teenage girl named Niki (Molly Ringwald), spunky and resourceful, the young scavenger becomes his companion and aids him in his search for the women.
At one point, they meet a group of female warriors who threaten them as they fall into a flooded facility of sorts. Niki drowns and Wolff tries to save her but both are caught in nets by the women, all of the sudden an aquatic reptile comes out of the water and scares the women, who then escape the picture shrieking and fleeting the scene.
The scene is very short, I wish the warrior women had more screen time because they weren't really that common in the early eighties. They don't do much, an action scene would have been good.
Niki's relationship with Wolff grows as the film goes on, at first they are sort of antagonistic but by the end they begin to like each other and a bond is created (similar to True Grit), I don't think it was a particularly well developed relationship and some of Niki's lines of dialogue were pretty bad and obviously written by old guys. Obviously because of her age Niki doesn't do much in the action sequences but she has a good little scene that involves her going through some sort of American Gladiators-style junkyard with futuristic obstacles.
Not a good movie but it has a few certain scenes that make it enjoyable.
The Wuxia genre is described as the grouping of Chinese historical martial arts works of fiction, however, the cinematic incarnation of the genre got it´s language of fast cutting/movement and swift strikes of frenetic montage with today´s film, Come Drink With Me by King Hu.
Hu was the filmmaker who solely kickstarted the martial arts sword fighting genre in its current form and with the unmistakably Chinese angle, aesthetics and philosophy. A bit of American editing, a bit of Japanese samurai techniques and plots, and finally the morals and values of China, all stylized and carried by strong female heroes. Some of Hu´s later classics include Dragon Inn (1967), A Touch of Zen (1970), The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) and The Valiant Ones (1975), among several other quality films.
One of the many incredible discoveries achieved by Hu in this picture is the casting of actress Cheng Pei-pei in the leading role. The former ballet dancer had zero martial arts training but Hun envisioned his fights more as dances and choreographies rather than typical combat, which meant the dancer was perfect for the role, without undermining her combat and physical capabilities. This forecasted the “Bullet Ballet” style from the heroic bloodshed movies and John Woo´s films. Cheng would go on to have a very prolific career in Hong Kong and Chinese cinema with films like Princess Iron Fan (1966), That Fiery Girl (1968), The Lady Hermit (1971), The Shadow Whip (1971), Wing Chun (1994), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Naked Weapon (2002), Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009), Mulan (2020), and MANY more.
The film follows heroine Golden Swallow, a swordswoman and martial artist who is tasked with a mission that involves rescuing her brother (both are children of a governor) who has been kidnapped by the fiendish bandit Jade-Faced Tiger, who is looking for the liberation of his master.
Swallow infiltrates the bandit´s territory posing as a man and quickly shows off her incredible fighting skills, making the rebels very wary of her presence. Eventually she is discovered and aided by a drunktard (fittingly nicknamed Drunken Cat) who turns out to be a magnificent Kung-Fu master, the drunk beggar has a troubled backstory with corrupt abbot Liao Kung, another powerful master and now an ally of Tiger. Both Swallow and Drunken Cat will join forces against Kung and the rebels.
Revenge, family bonds, blood brothers, fraternity, ambition and conviction; universal ideas often explored by wuxia films and perfectly encapsulated in this film´s storyline, even if the result is predictably a bit disjointed for modern audiences when it comes to normative story structure. The film is an effective fable, engagingly directed and with unrelenting action that has all the thrills and tricks to entertain even the most jaded martial arts film fans because the focus is on the solid narrative and characters.
The film advances with a distended plot progression, taking place in a few locations and moving slowly, but never feeling sluggish because of it´s firm visual storytelling. Hu´s great control of the image, in widescreen no less, with resounding tracking shots and panning shots, detailed shot compositions and large framing help make more interesting his handling of the filmic space.
The fights are noteworthy for their rhythm, pace and editing techniques rarely seen in such a way in popular Chinese cinema. These are dense confrontations of extreme silence interrupted by quick and loud attacks, breaking the atmosphere in a striking manner but always with full dominance of the form and rhythm. Overexcited instants (marked via sound effects and music stingers) cut off the established pace before promptly resuming it, irruptions that create anticipation and disrupt the flow intentionally, serving as accentuation for the action. The type of non-gratuitous and non-shallow action I appreciate in these classics.
One aspect that´s bewildering is the way Hun stylizes certain fragments and sometimes reaches an exaggerated overstylization that, far from becoming a negative, gets to a point of heightened reality, a beautiful rejection of strict reality (the quick cuts when the heroine is attacked by a horde of enemies cutting from a multitude of swords to a shot of suddenly unarmed enemies, Drunken Cat being able to catch heavy rocks with one hand, etc...).
Having a female being the heavy hitter protagonist was also a relatively new addition to Wuxia (although, it certainly wasn't a new idea for China's popular cinema as other heroines became popular around that decade as well), she was certainly a prototype for the powerful and dignified heroines of action movies done in China even today. The final showdown with Golden Swallow´s all-female warriors is also a magnificent and refreshing inclusion, it set up a standard for the now common “Amazon Brigade” trope in fiction.
One minor flaw is the ending, which declines giving the heroine the proper win, but instead Drunken Cat and Kung end up doing the final fight. Director King Hu was supposedly discontent with the addition of a second ending that rejects the merciful ending he probably had planned and goes straight for revenge. This would make him leave Shaw Brothers and go to Taiwan, where he would make his following films for Union Film Company.
A sequel was released in 1968 simply titled Golden Swallow with Cheng Pei-pei reprising her role. The film continues the characters adventures but this time the direction duties went to Chang Cheh (another martial arts movie legend).
As mentioned before, the film quickly became a hit and one of the most influential movies of all time, several future plots, themes, settings, aesthetic elements, editing tricks and art direction in Wuxia will be either directly or indirectly associated with Come Drink With Me in some way, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) to Kill Bill (2003-2004).
Easily a recommended picture for anyone interested in the genre and its genesis.
