Legend of the Red Dragon

I recently watched the movie Legend of the Red Dragon with Jet Li. This movie follows a Shaolin Master who's family was murdered throughout his quest for vengeance. One thing that I have begun to notice is that in many of the movies that I have watched for this blog project is that many of the movies involve some manner of tragedy at the beginning, and then a quest to right the wrong which has been committed. As a result, the movie tends to follow the exploits of the Hero, or in some cases the Anti-Hero throughout his or her journey where they encounter all sorts of trouble and by the close of the movie, the main character is either successful or unsuccessful with their mission. All in all, a lesson is normally learned out of the entirety of the film which typically deals with a Chinese maxim or proverb. In this particular film the main theme was simply good triumphing over evil, and how greed can destroy a person.

One such person who was directly affected by greed was the villain in this film known as Ma Ling-Yee. As a side plot in the film there were 5 boys with a tattoo on their backs which detailed the location of the hidden rebel treasure and Yee made it his goal to find this treasure. In order to have all of the map so that he could locate it he had to capture all of the boys. It was this pursuit that caught the attention of Hung Hei-Kwun (played by Jet Li). As a result, Kwun fights Yee and eventually defeats him in the fourth time the two of them meet in battle. Sadly there are no pictures of Yee that I can find on the internet to show you what he looks like, save to say that he wears the armor of a crocodile, and his face makes him look as though he is covered in scales.

I also observed an awful lot of wire work in this film, more so it seemed than in others which I have watched. This served to make what should have been a serious martial arts film into more of a comedy because of the ridiculousness of many of the fight sequences. In the following clip I have included a segment from the film that shows what I mean by the amount of wire work done with this film.

In this segment you can also observe some of the often "quarky" duologue that is not normally characteristic of this particular type of Jet Li movie, however this particular movie has made many different audiences laugh at attempt at serious duologue. Typically these movies are rooted deep in Chinese culture and the duologue often reflects this. However, in this movie, the duologue turns out much like a Stephen Chow film with all of, what I feel is accidental, comic relief sprinkled throughout the movie.

Over all I found this movie to be entertaining, however it was a different style that what I have come to be used to in a Jet Li movie.