Instead, it cold starts throwing plots at you like a broken batting cage. There are four main characters — with the admittedly awesome kung fu names of Blaze, Dragon, Tiger and, my personal favorite, Ace — all have their own plots, none of which have anything to do with each other, plus another plot together that has nothing to do with all that.
Near as I can figure, it goes like this: Dragon, Tiger, Blaze and Peter Criss are all slaves at a mine who complain that they’re being worked too hard, and because the guy who runs the mine has never seen a kung fu movie and doesn’t know that you don’t piss off guys named “Dragon” and “Tiger ” when you’re an evil warlord, he sends a dude named Forest to kill them. Forest shows up, slaughters a bunch of extras, and burns down their house while shouting and ripping off his shirt in a clear example of Hulkamania running wild:
At this point, the plot could stop. We’re done. The movie has provided a completely adequate reason for people to karate at each other until it’s time for the end credits. But instead, the movie not only replays this entire scene every twenty minutes, it fills the remainder of the next hour with additional plots that are all told in flashback.
Blaze hooks up with the mine boss’s daughter, Dan Dan, while a jealous guard gets drunk in the time honored kung fu movie tradition of pouring a jar of water on his face, there’s some other stuff about some missing Jade, and Ace ends up killing Dragon because Dragon killed his father or maybe he didn’t? It’s a f—-ing mess, and after a training montage set to to the Malaysian equivalent of Creed, it all more-or-less wraps up with a cagefight. This is the best part of the movie by far, because despite the return of the digital blood, there’s a scene where someone gets punched so hard that the sound effect is a horse whinnying.
I have no idea why this happens, but my current theory is that with most of the budget tied up with computer blood imaging, the foley artist eventually ran out of celery sticks to snap in half and just decided to cold punch a horse to get things done, which I’m pretty sure is the premise of next week’s entry.
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 Chris Sims is a freelance comedy writer from South Carolina. He briefly attended USC before he dropped out to spend more time with Grand Theft Auto, and his career subsequently took the path that you might expect from someone who makes that sort of decision. He blogs at http://www.the-isb.com and creates comics at http://www.actionagecomics.com. |