Wing Chun - Gentle Comedy, Kickass Action

Jul

11

Wing Chun - Gentle Comedy, Kickass Action

≡ Category: Comedy, Highly Recommended, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Movie Reviews By Country |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Martial Arts/Comedy
Director: Yuen Wo-Ping
Year: 1994

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Yuen Wo-Ping is well-known for directing gentle and humorous martial arts flicks with paradoxically kickass action. Wing Chun fits right in with his oeuvre.

Wing Chun (Michelle Yeoh) is a cross-dressing martial arts expert who runs a tofu stand with her Auntie, Abacus Fong (the wonderfully comic Kingdom Yuen King-Tan). One day, she rescues Charmy (Catherine Hung Yan) from some bandits led by Flying Monkey (Chui A-Fai), who wants to kidnap Charmy for the usual dastardly reasons. Wing Chun thus incurs the wrath not only of Flying Monkey, but of his brother, the even more formidable Flying Chimpanzee (perenial villain Norman Chu), leading to the usual expertly choreographed martial arts battles we expect from Yuen Wo-Ping.

Oddly enough, these aren’t even my favorite martial arts scenes. One of those would be the sequence in which Wing Chun challenges a visiting thug to squash a rectangle of tofu the size of a sheet cake resting on a table. It doesn’t sound like much, but the ways in which Wing Chun prevents this disaster are endlessly creative and entertaining. What’s more, watching Michelle Yeoh in action is hypnotizing. She’s acrobatic and elegant, and the male garb she’s wearing doesn’t diminish her sex appeal one bit.

But that isn’t why weasily Scholar Wong (Waise Lee) wants to marry her, though. He covets the skills of Wing Chun to protect his business from the bandits in the area, but being a skinflint, he reasons that marrying her would be cheaper than hiring her.

Waise Lee usually plays either hard-headed cops are duplicitous villains. Here, he’s broadly comic. Who knew that Waise Lee could be such an effective clown? I particularly liked the scene in which Wing Chun manipulates Scholar Wong’s limbs to fight off the bandits, saving face for Scholar Wong.

That’s not the only romantic maneuvering going on, though. Leung Pok To (Donnie Yen), who had a crush on Wing Chun when they were kids, comes back to town to woo her, but mistakes Charmy, who now works for the tofu shop, for his long lost love. Wing Chun is too crestfallen to say anything, so plenty of comic misunderstandings ensue, which are quite funny if you have any appreciation for Cantonese humor at all. Donnie Yen is quite effective as the essentially gentle dufus Leung Pok To, which makes me wish he had taken more of these kinds of roles.

Finally, the wily Abacus Fong, who is famous for having a sharp tongue and stinky breath, has a few tricks up her sleeve to nab a suitable mate.

Wing Chun isn’t perfect however. Probably due to an extremely low budget, the filmmakers apparently didn’t have the money to color time their print, so the shots often don’t match. A shot with a green cast will directly follow one with a red cast, which is distracting to say the least.

The other aspect of Wing Chun which is annoying is the overly undercranked fight footage of Donny Yen, which I suspect is Yen’s fault, since he was one of the martial arts choreographers, and is well known for this kind of nonsense.

But why carp when a martial arts comedy is as much fun as Wing Chun? There are lots of light hearted laughs, no one dies violently, and there are plenty of high flying martial arts acrobats to ooh and aah over. That’s more than enough for me.