Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen

From Infernal Affairs filmmaker Andrew Lau comes this unapologetically over-the-top actioner revolving around a circa WWI Chinese soldier (Donnie Yen’s Chen Zhen) who reinvents himself as a masked superhero after the war, with the movie devoted to, among other things, the character’s efforts at exacting revenge on several key Japanese figures. Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen opens with a ridiculous yet spectacularly entertaining sequence in which Yen’s character single-handedly takes on a small battalion of enemy soldiers, with the engrossing nature of the sequence effectively drawing the viewer into this larger-than-life landscape. It’s unfortunate, then, that the film segues into a dull, unexpectedly confusing story revolving around corrupt generals and political assassinations, and there’s little doubt that screenwriters Cheung Chi Sing, Gordon Chan, Lui Koon Nam, and Frankie Tam prove unable to consistently sustain the viewer’s interest – with the lack of character development for the protagonist certainly ranking high on the movie’s growing list of transgressions. Of course, it might have been easier to overlook this had Lau managed to include any periphery elements worth caring about – yet the filmmaker places a pervasive emphasis on subplots that couldn’t possibly be more dull (eg the exploits of three eye-rollingly inept cops). The presence of some unusually melodramatic episodes (eg Shu Qi’s character arc as a double agent) only compounds the film’s progressively uninvolving atmosphere, and although the movie does close with an admittedly engrossing battle (in which Yen’s character fights an entire dojo full of warriors), Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen has long-since established itself as a seriously misguided action epic.

*1/2 out of ****