It's been a good year and three months since I posted a review up here. Welcome back if you had a chance to peep the blog out, and peace, blessings and welcome if it's your first time here! I originally planned on dropping a review every week, but shit happens. Anyway I'm back, for now, so yeah.....
Ever since Prince Rakeem aka The Rzarector aka Chief Abbot aka Bobby Digital aka Zig Zag Zig Allah aka Bobby Steels aka Bobby Boulders aka The Scientist aka Robert F. Diggs dropped the video for the joint Tragedy (off the Rhyme & Reason soundtrack), I waited in anticipation for him to drop a full length martial arts flick.
I had the pleasure of seeing The Man With The Iron Fists twice and I wish I could have peeped it a few more times before writing this review. Although the movie is far from perfect, I was thoroughly impressed at The Rza's work as the writer, director, producer and star of his own full length kung fu flick.
The film takes place in nineteenth century China in Jungle Village, a place full of rival clans, fine Asian honeys, and a runaway slave turned blacksmith (Rza) who provides weapons to the clans and his love to one of the finest females in the flick, Lady Silk (played by the up & coming Jamie Chung).
The clans start beefing over a large shipment of government gold, and shit starts to get hectic in Jungle Village. Enter two of my favorite characters, Jack Knife (played by Russell Crowe), a violent outsider with a fetish for group sex and murder, and Bronze Body (played by former wrestler and current MMA fighter Bautista), a brolic fighter hired by the Lion Clan to hold shit down.
I am usually not a fan of Caucasians in martial arts flicks. Usually their either posers:
or some boxer or British solider who just fucks up the movie:
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| I'M GOING TO GET MY ASS WHOOPED....JUST BE PATIENT! |
Anyway, the Lion Clan gets salty that the blacksmith is helping out their former leader's son, Zen Yi aka X-Blade (dude had a bad ass suit), and they decide to deal with him in rather grotesque fashion (not going to spoil it, but it's the reason why The Rza gets his "iron fists...hehe). Jack Knife teams up with the blacksmith and Zen Yi for an ultimate showdown with the Lion Clan.
Like I said earlier, this movie is far from perfect. Rza didn't really cast any really talented martial artists in the movie. The fight scenes are cool (my personal favorite is the one with the Geminis), but most of the action is done with wire work. The movie could've used a character with serious martial arts skills a la Donnie Yen, Tony Jaa etc.
I thought it was with the utmost respect that The Rza called on Gordon Liu to play The Abbott of the Shaolin Temple (a role originally made for Rza's real life Shaolin teacher and mentor Shi Yan Ming, who was unable to get permission to return to China). It would have been dope to see some of Rza's training sequences or at least see some of the Shaolin Monks in action.
I have seen a lot of people diss The Rza's acting in the movie. I've seem him in other movies, and I'm not saying dude is award worthy, but he does have acting skills. I think here he was going for the "stoic hero" role and he did kind of overdo it.
I also expected him to be a little bit nicer with his own fighting scenes, seeing as much he has been studying Shaolin Kung Fu for some time with Shi Yan Ming.
The Rza was mad awkward in his fight scenes. It could have been due to what happens to his character, but I just though he would have pulled it off a little better.
I say all that to say this. The Man With The Iron Fists was a solid first offering (and I hope not the last) from the mind of The Rza. Many rappers think they have what it takes and delve into the film industry, and look to add on to the genre's that they grew up idolizing. Most of them fail miserably.
The Rza had a vision to create an authentic martial arts film like the movies he grew up on, and he came damn close. Jungle Village is a place that I could easily see Jet Li or Donnie Yen doing work in.The story flowed and held my attention, and I'll be damned if I didn't wish I was in Jungle Village a few times just so I could visit the Pink Blossom (props to Lucy Liu who did her thing as always as Madam Blossom). I give The Abbott the utmost respect for this creation and hope there is more to come in the future.
I give The Man With The Iron Fists 3 1/2 Fists. It may be too late to see it in theaters, but catch it if you can. If not cop it on Blu Ray/DVD to add to your collection.
For now peep the Red Band Trailer:
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Peace and Blessings until next time,
The Sage
Great review. Two thoughts:
ReplyDelete1. There is a difference between warrior arts and martial arts. Warrior artist kick ass and martial artist look good fighting. Most fighters are either or and few are both. I'm not surprised that Rza had a difficult time looking clean on the big screen. He needs to spend more time practicing forms and he will look sharper for his next flick.
2. I don't think people understood the power Rza could have gotten if the hip hop community would have supported him. Hopefully he went into the profit for this flick and he gets another deal on the table. If the hip hop community went out and supported it could have given him the power to do an epic African Martial Arts Movie or something. Sometimes people miss the bigger picture.....Bless.
Welcome back, nice review. LOVED the movie! Keep at it, you do good work.
ReplyDelete@Jamal I agree 100% about the support reference. I expected more love from the hip hop community. The first time I saw the movie I saw Fabolous in the theater in the snack line. He didn't go see the movie though (wasn't stalking but I saw it at 11:30 PM and there wasn't many people in the theater w me and my wisdom).
ReplyDelete@The Boogeyman..thanks for the support I appreciate it my dude
I agree with Jamal Hester ...Great review. Here are my thoughts:
ReplyDeleteIn the runup to the opening of RZA‘s The Man With the Iron Fists, some wondered whether Russell Crowe‘s part in the film amounted to a glorified cameo. In fact, it’s RZA who’s barely in his own movie. That might be for the best. Sleepy-eyed and retiring, RZA isn’t much of an actor. His star turn, as it were — he does play the film’s title character — may be the shyest action hero ever to hit the screen.
Even so, The Man With the Iron Fists is RZA’s movie through and through, a ragged amalgamation of all the stuff the Wu Tang Clan leader has cheered in his work since the Wu broke out in 1992. Shaw Brothers kung fu movies, westerns and Ennio Morricone scores, and the films of Quentin Tarantino leave deep bite marks in RZA’s story of a Chinese village populated by animal-themed clans, and the inevitable conflict they create.
The result is a big, colorful mess; it’s like watching a kid make some dream machine out of a thousand Legos. The Man With the Iron Fists isn’t good, by any conventional standard, but it is one hundred percent honest, and is sometimes more fun than any Hong Kong knockoff Hollywood has churned out in recent memory.
RZA is a blacksmith pressured into making weapons for gangs that roam his adopted home village. But he’s in the background through most of the movie as we see clans such as the Lion, Wolf, Black Widow fighting over the chance to take over a shipment of government gold. The blacksmith’s background is striking, and weirdly evocative of the forthcoming Django Unchained. Even so, his story isn’t one you’d want to hang a movie on.
Credit is due, too, to Byron Mann as primary bad guy Silver Lion; Mann plays the big-haired villain like Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips starring in an off-broadway musical version of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. I get the sense that RZA wanted another co-star, wrestler Dave Bautista, to be his own Bolo Yeung, which just isn’t possible. But I still got a kick out of Bautista playing the Shaw Brothers version of Colossus from the X-Men.
Bautista is one of many established fighters who fill out roles, but the fights are largely as forgettable as some of the characters, and that’s a problem. No one goes into this movie looking for a killer script, but one binding requirement is that audiences should be dying to see repeats of the fight scenes. There’s plenty of violence and gore (practical and digital), wild weapons, and a lot of motion, but only a couple encounters are ones memorable enough to talk about afterward. One, involving so-called Gemini Killers who lock yin/yang swords and execute weird feats of violent balance, is a post-credits talking point. But that’s due to its very silly nature, and not for the achievement in choreography or performance. Many fights feel like rehearsals.
The parts of the film that do work have a raw entertainment value, and there are moments of soul, where RZA’s respect for the culture of martial arts shines through. And I admire the way that RZA acts like the culture of weird, “everything plus the kitchen sink” Asian action movies hasn’t been worn thin and abused by major studios. He proves that the weird might still prevail, even as he proves that imitation can sometimes only be basic flattery.
The Man With the Iron Fists feels like the movie that RZA has wanted to make for thirty years; like it crams in all the strange ideas he’s thrown in a notebook for decades. But that’s not a movie; that’s a mix tape. I hope that RZA’s got all that stuff out of his system, and that if he makes another it can become something more than a fan’s brainstorming session committed to film.