Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon may not be a perfect film, but
it is most certainly a great film. Officially putting Ang Lee on the map, and
given his output we can debate the worth of that till kingdom come, its
combination of breath-taking fight scenes and phenomenal writing, not to
mention outright iconic music, resulted in what I would genuinely consider to
be a work of art. But more so than its merits as a film in its own right, its
place within film history is difficult to ignore as well. An international
co-production, it has gone into legend for basically breaking the Hollywood
system and what films should be expected to make an commercial impact, becoming
an exception to the rule that would end up having new rules written around it.
With all this in mind, and considering the unexpected quality control that can
go into Netflix releases, the prospect of a sequel to a film like this is
certainly interesting. But considering the Sequel Rules made around those that
are made over a decade after the fact, and the low expectations for success,
how did it turn out?
The plot: 18 years after the death of the legendary
swordsman Li Mu Bai, Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) has lived in isolation ever since
that tragic event. However, after her carriage is attacked by warriors from the
West Lotus clan, led by the vicious warlord Hades Dai (Jason Scott Lee), she is
drawn once again into the criminal underworld. A new war is about to begin,
centred on Li Mu Bai’s fabled weapon the Green Destiny sword, and it’s up to
Shu Lien and some new faces to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands yet
again.
While only having one cast member returning from the
original film, the cast is nonetheless full of recognisable names in the right
circles. Yeoh may be severely toned-down this time around, but she still brings
that same emotional intelligence that made her performance as Shu Lien so good
to begin with. Scott Lee brings a decent amount of menace to his role, Harry
Shum Jr. is okay as lower-ranking member of White Lotus Wei Fang, and quite
frankly it’s far better than I would have expected from anyone associated with
Glee, Natasha Liu Bordizzo as the morally ambiguous sword-maiden Snow Vase is
also just okay, and Donnie Yen is… well, it’s Donnie Yen; I don’t think the guy
has found a role yet that he doesn’t make work. Even if the role itself is
rather problematic, his turn as Silent Wolf is decent enough.
The action scenes are… okay. More akin to Stephen Chow than
the high-flying elegance of the original, it still has a certain grace to it.
Makes sense, considering the fight choreographer Woo-Ping Yuen not only worked
on the original film (and has returned this time around as director), but has
also worked on some of the more famous examples of Western fight choreography
with the Matrix and Kill Bills films. While I may miss the more spacious
cinematography put into the original fight scenes by Peter Pau, the more
proximal look here does end up fitting what we are given.
As strange as it may sound for a film that was by design a
martial-arts film, the fight scenes were hardly the most interesting aspect of
the original. Rather, it was the detailed character writing and strong themes
that were put into the people who were taking part in those fights. Writer John
Fusco’s last role as screenwriter was with The Forbidden Kingdom, which was
pretty good if somewhat rough around the edges; the man has shown ability
within this genre before. Not here, however, as the only returning character from
the first film feels less aged and more just a shadow of her former self, and
the new characters we get are characterised through signifiers, not traits. As
a follow-up to a film where even the smaller characters like the bumbling guard
and the disguised police officer with a vendetta against Jade Fox were fleshed
out to within an inch of their life, to say this pales in comparison is an
understatement.
This being touted as a sequel to Crouching Tiger is probably
it’s biggest fault, as along with failing to be as profound as the original,
this film just doesn’t seem to understand what made it work in the first place.
Where there was once a tinge of Taoist philosophy, there is generic
faux-Eastern mysticism; in the place of matters of the heart and matters of the
sword being shown with equal intensity and importance, we get a far greater
interest in the latter than the former; the original had
bubbling-under-the-surface feminism, this has empty tokenism. Hell, the developments
that are made to try and tie this in as a sequel purely in terms of story end
up stabbing some of the most crucial details of the original in the back. And
no, I’m not just talking about how the elongated warrior names that the
original made fun of are supposed to have honest meaning here. Silent Wolf’s
place in the narrative, knowing what his absence meant before, is done in the
usual desperately-written way of sequelisation, but it ends up leaving a very
sour taste in the mouth. As much as I wish I could enjoy this as its own work, the
fact that it keeps trying to be like the original and failing makes that
prospect impossible.
All in all, if this didn’t have the Crouching Tiger name
attached to it, this probably would have just flown under the radar as a
generic straight-to-home-media martial arts flick. But since it does have that name on it, and it does
such a piss-poor job of maintaining or even understanding what made that film
as good as it was, it fares far worse than it would’ve otherwise. The film
itself is honestly a lot like what it keeps insisting is the Green Destiny
sword here: Noticeably cheaper, far less care and detail put into its making,
and the fact that everyone involved in it keeps trying to insist that it has
the same importance as it used to just makes it mean less.
No comments:
Post a Comment