True Legend

2010 martial arts movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A war hero retires to start a family. His pissy adopted brother disrupts that, kills their father, and steals his son. With the help of a pair of jovial but mean gods, Su has to train to meet his brother again and save his family.

The line "You killed my father!" isn't in this, but it might as well be. I wish I would have started keeping track a long time ago of kung-fu movies where somebody gets mad at somebody else for killing his father.

I have trouble deciding whether I like this new martial arts movies. On the one hand, this is directed by Woo-ping Yuen, so you might guess (correctly) that the fight choreography is stunning. The story and a lot of the special effects have some issues, however. You almost have to look at this in three parts. The first part is standard stuff and suffers a bit from a whole bunch of those big swoopy majestic CGI effect moves complete with those impressive whoosh sounds to show sweeping landscapes or allow the camera to fly over the top of a giant battle. What was the first movie to use these because I'd like to have a word with it. There are a lot of effects in this first battle scene; still, it's a thrill, magically fast and bloody. And you get to see a guy with horns on his hat kill a pot of water. We skip ahead to the family drama and a brother with armor sewn into his skin who can make his veins turn a dark gray color. The movie's main conflict begins, and our protagonist and wife are thrown into some raging rapids where they disappear in a very weird way with some of the fakest CGI you'll ever see. Maybe it suffered from high-definition, but the effects just looked strange to me. And there was an over-dependence on them. CGI-birds? Why? Anyway, the bulk of this movie is what I'm calling the second part, where we meet some mystical characters who are either hallucinations or deities. The second sighting of those two guys, almost a wacky circus balancing act, is deliriously awesome, and the training sequences where the hero is throwing down with them are pretty great. And it builds to the big showdown where the movie should have probably ended. However, there's tragedy, and a new ending is required so we have a third part featuring wrestlers and David Carradine. I'm not going to complain about David Carradine ever, but this stuff with his wrestling thugs seems anticlimactic after the brother-on-brother action has completed. And one of the wrestlers, a guy with an eyepatch, has a distracting giant hole in the crotch of his pants. I assume that was not a CGI-hole, but it might have been. There's also a scene where David Carradine Barry-Bonds one of his wrestlers which is just dopey. This third part does showcase the drunken boxing beautifully and has an exhilarating sequence in a bar where a fight between a pair of inebriated guys transforms into a breakdance showdown that would put Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo to shame. But since our main story is done, it's all superfluous, isn't it? I liked Wenzhuo Zhao as the lead, especially when he's bearded and disheveled. He doesn't have a ton of charisma, but he was playing a badly beaten character for most of this and charisma probably wouldn't have been appropriate. I'd like to see more of him though. And the God of Wushu character was played by Jay Chou who is Kato in whatever green superhero movie has Kato in it. Either that or he's Kato in an O.J. Simpson biopic.

Kent recommended this. I wanted to like it better.