Kung Fu Kid 少林英雄之方世玉洪熙官

Chin Kar-Lok plays the legendary Fong Sai-Yuk himself, a role that Meng Fei, Alexander Fu Sheng, and, in the same year, Jet Li had all taken on at various times. In this film, Fong is still young and just learning martial arts from his mother, already managing to stumble into a government conflict, into which he is drawn by the fugitive Shaolin monk Hong Xi-Guan (Lam Ching-Ying).

Impressions: The film was made by the same team that had just made Great Hero from China, and it shows. It feels like the two were shot in parallel — Chin Kar-Lok's fake fringe seems designed to hide the forehead he'd shaved for Great Hero from China. The similarities between the films hardly end with that actor's hairstyle, though: the whole approach is the same, namely to cash in as much as possible on the wave of success of Jet Li's recent films. The cast is virtually unchanged too — Chin Kar-Lok and Lam Ching-Ying again take the lead roles.

But never mind that — the budget was clearly tiny, so let's see what the filmmakers managed to squeeze out of those pennies. First, there's obvious progress: the film is more comedic than Great Hero from China, and it's a slightly easier watch because of that. Chin Kar-Lok clowns around quite merrily and energetically, bringing at least some variety to the endless parade of idiotic dialogue (the acting is terrible on top of that) and naive, amateurish fights. Admittedly, I'm getting carried away there. The fights aren't amateurish in the usual sense of the word — the choreographer knows how this sort of thing is done, and they look fairly dynamic and inventive. It's just that either there was no time to polish them or no desire to, but the unreal flight trajectories plus the obvious overuse of wires would be tolerable if those very wires didn't keep creeping into frame! Strangely enough, hardly a single wire was bothered to be removed, and on slow motion you can see literally the entire system of safety cables. On top of everything, the actress playing Fong Sai-Yuk's mother is dubbed by some guy whose face is quite clearly visible during the fights (the camera doesn't even try to pull back during the especially "dangerous" moments, preferring to show off the stunt double's decidedly un-feminine features). So that's the film we have — cheerful and absolutely unprofessionally made. Personally, I watched it without much strain — it's not a classic, and not even a good film, but in the end it's at least some variety (better than what Philip Ko has been doing lately, anyway).