rena's websight New Fist Of Fury
Another old movie from the time when they were trying to cast Jackie Chan as the new Bruce Lee, this one is actually a sequel to one of Bruce Lee’s films, fist of fury.
First off, the cinematography and film making in this movie is astounding. There’s a number of beautiful scenes and the characters are always well framed. We were about to watch one of the original versions, but found the 2020 blu-ray remaster of the film and wow I’m glad we did. The footage was beautifully restored to the point where it could have been filmed last year and just made to look like a classic kung fu movie.
Some of the characters are really cool, like the young female leader of the Chinese martial arts school, who I wish we got to see fight more. There’s clearly some sort of message here, as the movie being set in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, and the Chinese martial arts are being oppressed by the Japanese Karate masters who insist that their fighters and martial arts are superior.
Jackie starts out indifferent to this but is eventually convinced to stand up for them. In the middle of the movie the Chinese martial arts girl makes an impassioned speach about Jackie embodying the spirit of her dead brother which seemed out of place at the time, but we realised after a while that she was referring to Bruce Lee, which makes sense seeing as how they were trying to posture Jackie as the new Bruce Lee.
I believe that he didn’t want that, and this is around the point where he diverged to develop the more comedic style we know today. The movie ends suddenly and bizarrely. Overall this movie was pretty enjoyable and the film making and restored quality of the footage was great, but it has a more serious tone than most Jackie Chan films so might not be for everyone.
