The 10 Brothers of Shaolin is one of the latter, a nondescript fightfest, which I bother to write about only in case you find yourself in the same Hollywood Video and don't want to see a Jackie Chan movie. It's decent enough for ass-kicking purposes, with ten disciples of the Shaolin temple escorting a puffy, milquetoast bureaucrat (or possibly king -- I wasn't totally clear on that) somewhere that the ruling commandant didn't want him to go. As you may be able to tell, either the plot wasn't explained very clearly, or I wasn't paying attention, but it's all just a frame upon which to hang fight scenes anyway. I was looking forward to seeing some aerial work (known, as the articles in Total Movie tell me, as "wire fu"), but evidently the makers of this film didn't have the budget for "wire fu" and made do with "ellipsis fu," whereby they show a guy jumping up, a flash of clothing in the air, and the guy landing 40 feet away, leaving you to fill in the blanks. Still, the fighting is pretty cool, and the sound effects make it clear that what looks like a pat on the head is actually crushing the skull.
When I was at Duke, a friend and I went through a phase of Jackie Chan movies. We asked a couple who had seen a lot of kung fu movies which were Chan's best, and one of the ones they recommended was Project A, Part 2. My friend and I joked that we wouldn't understand what was going on because we hadn't seen Project A, Part 1. As it turns out, we were right -- toward the end of Part 2, some pirates -- who hadn't shown up in the movie up to that point -- come bursting in and save the day. Our friends later filled us in -- evidently the pirates play an integral role in Part 1. Well, I want to know where the pirates came from, so I rented Project A (part 1).
I was a little disappointed in the pirate quotient. Oh,
sure,
there's all this talk about pirates, but you don't actually see
any until about an hour into the movie. But when they do show up,
they're really cool. In the meantime, there's a nifty chase on
bicycles
and a great fight scene where Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung team up.
All in all, a fine piece of the Chan oeuvre -- even the
slapstick
comedy seems to work better here than in some of his recent ones.
Grey Owl has nothing to do with kung fu, but it doesn't merit a separate review, so I'm tacking it on to this one. It's a direct-to-video movie, which is usually a huge red flag, but this one happens to be directed by Sir Richard Attenborough. So it's not exactly your typical DTV schlock. Based on a true story, it stars Pierce Brosnan as a half-Apache, half-Scottish (or some such combination -- his story changes) trapper and guide living in the wilderness in 1930s Canada. Much like Little Big Man or A Man Called Horse, he's been adopted by an Indian tribe, in this case Ojibway. A local, city-raised, young, beautiful Indian woman wants to find out more about "her people" and follows Archie Grey Owl, as Brosnan's character calls himself, into the wilderness for a brutal winter during which (of course) they fall in love. He decides to give up trapping after she adopts two orphaned baby beavers; though at first contemptuous of her sentimentality, he ends up becoming attached to the little critters, too, and though he cloaks his decision as a step toward stopping the decline of the beavers in the region in general, it's made clear he does it because those two adorable little babies make him realize animals are people, too (a transformation I found rather fast and facile).
The movie has a strong ecological message -- Grey Owl becomes a park ranger after giving up trapping -- and it's a fascinating story, but it's not compellingly told. In fact, I fell asleep. Brosnan looks disturbingly like Steven Seagal with his hair long and braided, and maybe he's trying for inscrutability, but he's about as expressive as Seagal, too. You see far too little of the stunning landscape he loves so much. Every conflict that's painstakingly set up is resolved in a flash, whether it be his sudden conversion to seeing animals as pets instead of pelts or his fear of public speaking, which vanishes as soon as he steps in front of a crowd -- or rather, as soon as his girlfriend sends the two little beavers scurrying out to him (those little critters do as much for the plot, if not more, as the humans).
It's certainly an admirable movie to try to make -- too bad it's not a better one.
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