The Kungfu Master 八卦宗师

Dong Haichuan (Jie Miu) is a young kung fu master who, to his misfortune, gets in the way of an influential official's son. The latter tries to teach the insolent country bumpkin a lesson, but in the end dies himself, and Dong finds himself an outlaw. He has to leave home and set off on a journey during which he will change several teachers and eventually become a true virtuoso of the martial arts.

Dong Hai-Chuan is a well-known figure in Chinese history: he is considered the founder of the bagua zhang school, or bagua for short. This style is not very popular in martial arts cinema (off the top of one's head, one can recall perhaps only the 1983 film Bagua Fighter, or Honor of Dong Fangxu, made, tellingly, not in Hong Kong but on the mainland), but it is certainly intriguing and quite spectacular, so given the fashion for all manner of biopics, embellished to varying degrees, about the lives of great martial arts masters of the past (Fearless, True Legend, Ip Man), there is nothing surprising about the appearance of The Kungfu Master.

Nevertheless, this film is of a completely different caliber from those listed above — more modest and cheaper, and it looks as though it is not a full-fledged feature film but a cut-down version of a TV series. It is clear that the filmmakers have limited experience in martial arts cinema — the film is staged like a television play, with long dialogue scenes filled with meaningful pauses and prolonged gazes, while the action scenes are spoiled by frankly unsuccessful camerawork and chaotic editing (not fast, just senseless).

This is especially sad because the fight scenes are the film's main and only adornment (though, let me say right away, don't expect a miracle — this is a good "TV-series" level, but no more than that). Hai-Chuan is played by two actors — Jie Miu (the very kid who helped Jet Li in The New Legend of Shaolin and My Father Is a Hero) in the first half of the film, and Wu Lihao, a martial arts master who also choreographed all the fights in the picture, in the second. In supporting roles are both young starlets (wushu champion Wang Mei-Ying) and distinguished veterans Xiong Xin-Xin, Bruce Leung and Chang Tao. Far from all of them take part in the fight scenes, but the very fact of their involvement lends the picture a certain weight.