The Man With The Iron Fists 2 hit Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD on 4/14/15 from Universal Home Entertainment
From here until the end of time, I will never understand why The Man With The Iron Fists wasn’t a bigger hit. It wasn’t a perfect film, but for martial arts fanatics, for fans of the Wu Tang Clan, for fans of stuff that’s just plain awesome, it was pretty much everything you could hope for in a movie directed by the RZA.
It was a passion project culled from a lifetime of Saturday afternoon ‘Kung Fu Theater’ fandom, and that love was manifest in every frame.
How could anybody hate on a movie that actually went to the trouble of subtly making the main bad guy Silver Lion sound exactly like the poorly dubbed version of himself would be if this were actually airing on an episode of ‘Kung Fu Theater’?
That is bone deep love, right there.
But I am told by reliable sources that the film is a misfire, a catastrophe, or to quote one wag on the internet, “Kind of shitty.”
So be it.
If I am out of step with what the people want, then I guess I can recommend Man With The Iron Fists 2. Because it’s not very good, which means that everyone will probably love it.
RZA writes and co-stars, but hands off the reins to Roel Reine, whose imdb page is rife with Direct To Video sequels, including a 12 Rounds follow-up and a Marine sequel.
Which leads me to institute a new rule: If you’re responsible for sequels to more than one movie starring John Cena, you are hereby banned from doing ninja shit. Which is a very specific rule I don’t see being applied that often. But if the situation arises, precautions have been taken.
There’s a palpable difference in the texture of the movie from frame one. First, it’s drabber. This film lacks the day-glo pop of the first installment. But more damningly, the fights, while well choreographed, are shot and cut in a decidedly more modern style.
Say what you will about the RZA as a director, he definitely has a sense of how a martial arts sequence should be filmed. It’s a very specific skill set, and he absolutely has it.
Roel Reine is a fine director of action (I’ve seen a couple of his other movies, and they’re pretty good for DTV), and the action here is at least spatially coherent. But he has absolutely zero feel for the rhythms of a decent martial arts brawl. Which is problematic when you’re making a martial arts film.
The story finds Thaddeus, a.k.a. The Blacksmith (RZA, the only returning character not counting some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stock footage of the Gemini Twins in action) having left Jungle Village to find peace at his old temple. But he is attacked by remnants of the Lion Clan while en route and seriously injured, and washes up on the shore of Sai Fu Village, a small mining township. He spends the first half of the movie on bedrest while we follow the exploits of Li Kung, a miner who struggles to remain neutral as tension increase between the miners and the villages’ vicious Chief Justice, Master Ho (Carl Ng). Ho, leader of the Beetle Clan, is on a search for the Golden Nectar, a sacred pool of Chi with mystical powers.
Also, there’s some kind of demon or something sucking the souls out of the villagers’ daughters.
So you can probably more or less figure out where things go from there…
According to the RZA in a behind the scenes featurette, his goal with this sequel was to tell a darker, less over-the-top story, and in this, he succeeded.
Which is a problem for me, because the over the top nature of the first movie was its biggest draw.
(Well, that and the promise of a genuine musical score by RZA, something we haven’t gotten since Ghost Dog. The music here is by RZA and some guy named Howard Drossin, and it’s clear Drossin did most of the heavy lifting. Most of it is a more typical type of score, with some added RZA-type touches here and there. Bonus points, however, for their use of Thea Van Sijen’s lovely “Baby Boy”.)
There are none of the first movies’ inventive weapons here, just some tricked out pickaxes. And there are no characters as gleefully hammy as Russell Crowe’s got for his deeply demented turn as Jack Knife. People aren’t flying through the air or turning into brass here.
Hell, there isn’t even an army of prostitute assassins in this one.
The charm of the first movie (and clearly, the mileage varied on that one) was the dedication to recapturing the anything goes feel of those early Shaw Brothers pictures. Making things more down to Earth seems to me to be missing the point entirely.
It doesn’t help that instead of a dynamic, charismatic lead like Cung Le as Zen Yi The X-Blade we have Dustin Nguyen as Li Kung, who isn’t any kind of blade at all.
Li Kung is that most dreaded of martial arts characters, the fighter that doesn’t want to fight.
Look, RZA (Can I call you RZA? Or would you prefer The Abbot? Bobby Digital, maybe?) I shouldn’t have to tell you this: We’re martial arts fans. We like the fighting.
NONE OF US WANT TO WATCH A DUDE NOT FIGHT.
I could watch literally any movie with Greg Kinnear if that was what I wanted!
I know, I know: it’s supposed to be an “arc”. But it’s the worst kind of arc. And you KNOW it’s a bad arc when the audience reaction isn’t “Wow, he’s really grown”, but “Yay! He’s finally doing that thing I paid money to watch him do!”
So with Li Kung more or less sitting things out until damn near the third act, and RZA generously ceding his screen time to everyone else (while tragically depriving us of his singularly odd performance style, which I for one find deeply endearing), it falls to our baddie Master Ho to carry the weight of most of the action.
While he’s no Silver Lion, Carl Ng squeezes a fair amount of malevolence out of his role. He’s kind of funny, but not so much that you don’t want to see him get taken out, which is always a plus. And he’s got some good moves. But in the end, the commitment to realism (such as it is) weighs the film down.
When we’re not fighting, we’re stuck with characters that lack the comic book vividness of even the minor characters from the first film. We spend a lot of time with Li Kungs family, wife Ah Ni (Eugenia Yuan) and Innocence (Pim Bubear), to little effect. And there’s way more time spent than strictly necessary with a comic relief dude named Cha Pow.
Comic relief in kung fu movies is almost always the worst, but in this case, he gets a sweet pair of metal teeth. So this one kind of balances out.
Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa plays the wheelchair bound Mayor who gets some iron legs late in the film. So there’s that, too.
But that sort of ridiculousness is exactly what’s missing here. To the extent the first one worked it was due to that fidelity to the old school. Making it grittier, edgier, and less fantastic might appeal to most people, but most people didn’t get this screener. I did. And these sorts of changes are not my bag.
Of course, I have to allow for the fact that everyone hates the first one except me, so I could very well be wrong here. And to be fair, there’s plenty of entertaining (and from what I can tell, mostly practical) gore, and the fighting is good, especially when we get to the final battle and things start to get a little loose (the way the Final Boss gets taken out is one for the ages). And issues with the low lighting and the overabundance of brown and grey tones aside, this movie is fairly impressive visually. Shooting in Thailand gave them access to some gorgeous vistas and Reine makes the most out of having access to a crane. There’s a drinking game in taking a shot every time we switch to a birds’ eye view of the action.
Really, the only way the movie suffers is in comparison to the first one. The majority of the problems I have with the movie fade away when it’s taken out of that specific context. And as I think back on it, it’s not entirely the slog I might be making it sound like. In fact, if I were to write this review next week, there’s a slight chance it might actually wind up being a mild recommendation.
But I’m writing it now, so as it stands, it’s a pass.
That said, the movie provides a clear setup for any number of sequels, with the Blacksmith walking the Earth, visiting villages in need of help, spending the second act in bed recovering, and then punching people to death with his awesome metal fists before moving on to the next town.
I am all in favor of this, as long as RZA stays true to the principles of the classics we both grew up with, where imagination ran wild and bloody.
Also, no more dudes that don’t want to fight. That’s just stupid.
NOTE: The copy of the film I received had both an unrated and an R rated version. This review applies only to the unrated version, which is the only one I watched because come on, people…
SPECIAL FEATURES: Some rightfully deleted scenes (except for a third act mine fight they really should have left in); a Making Of featurette, audio commentary with The RZA and Roel Reine.
