The Man with the Iron Fists

2012 kung-fu movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Some bad guys try to steal some treasure, and it's up to a blacksmith and a government official to stop them.

This is a kind of labor of love for Wu-Tang Clan's RZA who co-wrote this with Eli Roth, directed, and ill-advisedly stars in the thing. I suppose the directing is admirable. Man looks as good as any other modern kung-fu movie with some dazzling acrobatics, some ok special effects (not the CGI wolves at the beginning--that's one of the grossest effects I've ever seen), and a lot of bloodletting, including much spurting and even some visible viscera that could get fans of that sort of thing excited enough. The story's not awful but a bit of a mess, not the worst thing that can happen to a kung-fu movie. It was good to see both Gordon Liu and Pam Grier, the latter whom the guy who works across the hall from me referred to as his "celebrity crush" although I'm sure he's talking about Pam Grier in her prime. The former is somebody I might have a celebrity crush on, and I don't even care if it's Gordon Liu in his prime or not. When I think of kung-fu, I think of Russell Crowe, and he sneaks into this thing as an under-realized perverse anti-hero with the not-as-clever-as-RZA-thinks name Jack Knife. I had to give this a bonus point because Crowe's character refers to his phallus as "the baby's arm" when requesting to put it inside Lucy Liu's character. Speaking of Liu, she's absolutely awful here, delivering lines that I'm sure both she and RZA think are much cuter than they actually are. Her performance is worse than RZA's, but he shouldn't have been in his own movie either, at least not with a speaking role. He seems tired or high, or maybe he's both. The more traditional kung-fu hero is played by Rick Yune, and I don't like that character at all. It'd be fine if there was a cool bad guy, but we're given Silver Lion played by a guy named Byron Mann. Silver Lion looks way too much like Revenge of the Nerds' Booger to take seriously. And later, there's an even worse bad guy--Dagger! If you're watching a kung-fu movie and can't root for the good guys or the bad guys, the kung-fu movie is in some serious trouble. The most intriguing characters--other than some disappointingly only nearly-nude whores that are definitely not utilized to their full potential--are the Gemini Twins who aren't in the movie enough and really don't have that much to do. They're barely more than a deleted scene or two that made it into the movie because RZA filmed the stuff and didn't want to cut anything. There's an "Attaboy, Luther" moment when a random voice in the crowd says, "Gemini Stance!" A clumsy flashback done so poorly that it managed to be comical was probably the film's worst moment, one that might showcase the director's limitations more than anything else. A worse decision, however, was the use of Wu-Tang Klan music (Ol' Dirty Bastard if I'm recalling correctly) and other questionable choices. I'm also not sure what I thought about the use of animal growls during fight scenes, but I probably didn't like those either. There's a guy made from metal--didn't I just see that somewhere else?--and a bunch of unique weapons that show RZA's potential with this sort of thing, but he, as a classic kung-fu Shaw Brothers aficionado, really should have known better and not released something that seems like less of an homage than a tacky rehash of other recent modern martial arts flicks. The credits, by the way, seem to be a prelude to a sequel which has bird people in it, and despite the inclusion of bird people, that movie looks like it could end up even worse than this one.