Tag: The Final Master

Where the Action Was: In an Age Decried for both CGI and Festival Pandering, R. Emmet Sweeney Presents the Best in Fight Scenes

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Originally published in the January-February 2020 issue of Film Comment

By R. Emmet Sweeney

2010

Robot (Enthiran)

Androids Assemble

Proof that South Indian cinema could compete on the same level as Bollywood, this mind-bending sci-fi spectacular directed by S. Shankar, with stunt choreography by Yuen Woo-ping (!), is a robot-gone-bad Tamil blockbuster starring ageless Superstar Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai. The centerpiece is a cops vs evil robot battle in which the android, now replicated into hundreds of clones, arranges itself into different murderous shapes, including a ball of guns, a bullet-spitting snake, a drill, and in its final form, a skyscraper-sized giant who flips off the scientist who created him. It is a sequence of joyful, surreally mischievous destruction.

2011

Fast Five

Vault Heist

After Fast & Furious, Justin Lin wanted to ease back on CGI and put the emphasis on more practical car stunts. Wily veteran choreographer Jack Gill obliged with the most memorable sequence in the franchise, a daredevil heist in which Vin Diesel and Paul Walker drag a bank vault out of a building and onto the highway, connected to their souped-up Dodge Chargers with a length of cable. The vault model used weighed 10,000 pounds, and the stunt drivers make it swing into oncoming corrupt cop cars with jaw dropping precision.

2012

The Raid: Redemption

Hallway Machete Fight

The most influential action film of the decade is a relentlessly bloody low-budget fight film from Indonesia, directed by Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans. It introduced Iko Uwais as both star and fight choreographer, along with the Silat style of martial arts (which necessitates close range to utilize the sharp edges of knees and elbows). Its structure of one never-ending fight was a model for John Wick, Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes For Us, and endless knockoffs like Jailbreak. It’s hard to pick just one fight out of the endless flow, but I’ll go with the machete fight in a hallway, in which Iko is outnumbered 4 to 1, and out machete’d by the same amount. After a establishing shot of the bleak setup, Uwais swiftly closes the gap and delivers a blisteringly fast array of high knees and elbows to various faces, ending with an exclamation point as he slams the final opponents head into the ground like he is cracking a coconut.

2013

Drug War

Final Shootout

Drug War is an exacting and pitiless mapping of cops, informants, and drug dealers, all triangulating to a deadly fate. It is another of Johnnie To’s rigorously composed gangster films, but the first made with Mainland money. This one feels more mechanical than the Elections or Exiled, as if they are playing out predetermined fates. Timmy (Louis Koo) is the snitch, who forces a collision between the undercover cops who are controlling him and the drug gangs he has been attempting to infiltrate. To orchestrates the final shootout in near silence, punctuated by short staccato bursts of bullets as Timmy tries to orient the cops and gangs against each other in a mutually assured destruction of crossfire. But the geometry fails Timmy as well, who ends up handcuffed to his own deadly design.

2014

John Wick

Red Circle Club

For Hollywood action films the 2010s were defined by the ascendance of 87eleven Action Design. Founded by ex-stuntmen Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, their innovation was being a one stop shop, selling complete action sequences to films still in preproduction, providing the choreography, the stunt performers, and the 2nd unit direction. They would even train your star. Previously these were all separately staffed jobs, changing how blockbusters did business.

Stalhelski and Leitch, of course, went on to start the ongoing John Wick franchise, which was heavily influenced by Hong Kong choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, who they saw at work on The Matrix as members of the stunt team. The standout sequence in the first John Wick is the Red Circle nightclub shootout, an homage to Jean Pierre-Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge. Keanu Reeves is a model-like figure, like Alain Delon in the Melville film, who cuts through the Russian mob hangout with frictionless “gun-fu” and Brazilian jiu-jitsu takedowns. The muzzle flashes of the gunfight nearly matches the rhythm of the flickering disco ball lighting, and when Reeves emerges onto the nightclub floor, with undulating patterns projected behind him as the throbbing EDM fills the soundtrack, it momentarily embraces its destiny as a musical.

2015

Mad Max: Fury Road

Final Chase Back to The Citadel

Like The Raid, this is one long action sequence, though a chase film rather than a fight, a rolling revue of malformed steampunk freaks, pole jumping maniacs, and one demented power chord-playing mascot, all driving armored muscle cars trying to take down a one-armed Charlize Theron and a mute Tom Hardy. An overwhelming work orchestrated by George Miller and his longtime stunt choreographer Guy Norris, it is a testament to the remarkable stunt performers who labored for five months to get their vision up on the screen. It all comes together with overwhelming force in the final chase, a gonzo act of action filmmaking in which there are spectacular car crashes, blooming explosions, obscenely risky stunts (especially on those bendy poles that dip into moving vehicles), and hand-to-hand combat atop speeding wrecks that is pure piston-pumping poetry.

2016

The Final Master

Series of Duels

Chinese director Xu Haofeng is also a martial arts historian, and his films reflect his studies. He believes that “A real kung fu battle lasts only seconds. And the results of a competition between top practitioners are decided even before opponents begin combat.” The Final Master is another of his intensely ritualized takes on the genre, and it ends with a hypnotic succession of duels as Liao Fan, who trained for two months before shooting, consecutively defeats the masters from nineteen schools of kung fu in Tianjin. Fighters are doomed by their choice of weapon, stance, or target before the bouts have even begun, giving these fights an abstracted quality, as if they had already taken place and these are re-enactments or, perhaps more accurately, how-to manuals. Liao Fan often pauses at the end of each encounter, holding the winning thrust in place for examination by willing students.

2017

Baahubali 2: The Conclusion

Pindari attack on Kuntal Desh

The biggest Indian movie of 2017 was this mythological action melodrama directed by SS Rajamouli and starring the dashingly shirtless Prabhas. A complex tale of a warring royal family and the titular Baahubali’s (and son’s) thwarted path to the throne, its action scenes have an inventive pulp sensibility that recently went viral on Twitter (people love soldiers getting slingshotted onto a castle). I found the most joy in the Pindari attack on Kuntal Desh, when Baahubali Jr first meets his great love Princess Devasena (Anushka Shetty). Their meet cute occurs as they turn a bloody archery fight against Pindari warriors into a giddy dance, spinning each other around into position to kill dozens of unlucky soldiers. It’s love at first archery bow sight.

2018

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Bathroom Fight

The Mission: Impossible franchise has become a reliable source of insane Tom Cruise stunts for years now, and Fallout is no slouch with its 25,000 foot HALO jump out of a jet. But my favorite of the Wade Eastwood designed set pieces is the bathroom fight between Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, and Liang Yang (an expressively intense stuntman getting his first extended acting job here) which is brutal, funny, and effortlessly conveys the personality of the characters. Cruise is mostly out of breath and a step behind, buying time to think his way out of it, while Cavill is a meathead monster who smashes Yang through a mirror and raises his fists as if he was in a golden gloves bout and not a black ops mission. Yang is the superior fighter to them both, and his face exhibits an intimidating sense of calm that will be pierced only when an unexpected fourth person enters the fray, rearranging the power dynamics for the last time in the fight.

2019

Avengement

Pub Brawl

The latest collaboration between British DTV kings Scott Adkins and director Jesse V. Johnson (their fifth in two years) is a bare knuckle brawler of a film. Adkins plays a small time London crook hardened by his time in the pen – someone put a price on his head so he is constantly getting into ugly, tooth shattering fights. The film tracks his revenge against the gang who put him into jail, holding them hostage at a grimy pub until his brother (Craig Fairbrass) shows up – and then all hell breaks loose. Adkins and fight coordinator Dan Styles opt for sloppy, inebriated violence, finding creative blood-spurting uses for 2x4s, crowbars, and conveniently placed pickled egg jars.

MARTIAL ARTIST: XU HAOFENG’S THE FINAL MASTER (2015)

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June 7, 2016

Xu Haofeng is a student of martial arts, a chronicler of its lore and history. He graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1997, but instead of entering the movie business, he spent over a decade tracking down old kung fu masters and writing wuxia novels. His most famous publication is The Bygone Kung Fu World (Shiqu de Wulin, 2006), a book about Li Zhongxuan , a practitioner of xingyiquan, one of the Wudang styles of Chinese martial arts (Wong Kar-wai admired the book, which led him to hire Xu to co-write The Grandmaster). When Xu found him, Li had been working as a receptionist for a household appliance store in downtown Beijing for decades. Xu is obsessed with preserving the minutae of kung fu history. He told China Daily that,  “A real kung fu battle lasts only seconds. And the results of a competition between top practitioners are decided even before opponents begin combat.” This reveals itself in his directorial debut The Sword Identity (2011), an elliptical and idiosyncratic martial arts film  in which fights end in the blink of an eye. Xu’s latest feature, The Final Master, was released into U.S. theaters this past weekend, and is yet another intensely ritualized take on the kung fu film.

Based on one of Xu’s novellas, The Final Master takes place in 1930s Tianjin, a heavily Westernized port city. The Qing dynasty had been ceding territory, or “concessions”, within the city to European countries since the 19th century in order to encourage trade, hence all the English language advertising seen slapped all over town. Chen Shi (Liao Fan) makes a vow to his master to pass on the lessons of the Wing Chun fighting style to future generations. Exiled from Canton, he attempts to set up an academy in Tianjin. The only way to open a school in the city, however, is to beat the eight great martial arts houses in battle. Wanting to blend into society, he makes a business arrangement with an acid tongued barmaid with a Rudolph Valentino crush (Song Jia) to be his wife, as a strange single drfiter would cause undue attention. He also learns that an outsider would never be accepted into the Tianjin martial arts community, so he drafts the cocky local Geng Liangchen (Song Yang), to train as an apprentice. The rules keep shifting under Chen Shi’s feet, however, as local politics and the poisonous influence of dojo boss Madame Zou (a delightfully evil Wenli Jiang) and the increasing power of the military begins to undermine the old martial arts traditions. Whether or not Chen Shi gets to open his academy, he will face down all eight dojos, regardless of the cost.

As in The Sword Identity, the fights are staged with unfamiliar quickness (The Final Master won for Best Action Choreography at the 2015 Golden Horse Awards). Xu believes this to be a more realistic way of depicting how martial arts were actually fought, a matter of one quick thrust or parry before defeat. Liao Fan trained for two months to pull off the style Xu prefers – which forbids the use of stuntmen. Fighters are doomed by their choice of weapon, stance, or target before the bouts have even begun. These are not adrenaline pumping sequences, but cerebral and cunning. It is disorienting to watch these after decades of ever-more elaborate stunts and wire-work, making these “realist” fights seem abstract, suggestions of fights, templates of them, rather than the real thing. It gives Xu’s films a rather ritualistic dreamlike quality, of men going through pre-determined motions. In the climactic battle, held in a stone alleyway, waves of  fighters ebb and flow with disturbing orderliness, they bow in defeat and depart as if completing a stage acts. For Xu these are the only moments that matter – the clash of broad Northern swords with Chen Shi’s smaller, quicker Southern blades. His narratives float, while his fights are freighted with the weight of the world. The Sword Identity and The Final Master have near-identical plots, about beating martial arts schools so out-of-town masters can open an academy (I haven’t seen his second feature, 2011′s Judge Archer, because it has never been released, even in China) . But this basic set-up fractures into pieces as the moves go along, with none of the normal plot payoffs one would expect of such a linear narrative line. Instead there are proliferating subplots and a miasma of obscure motivations. Xu never allows you to see inside his characters’ heads. You have to read them from the way they move.

Near the beginning Chen Shi has just entered Tianjin and is having dinner at a Western restaurant. He is told no one has ever eaten more than five loaves of their bread at one sitting. So, to match the number of martial arts houses he has to beat, he starts eating eight loaves of bread before stalling in gluten overload. Everything in Xu’s films is a test of some sort or another that has to be met, though resolutions are foggy and happy endings are non-existent. The fighters in Xu Haofeng’s films abide by Tom Sizemore’s line in Heat, “the action is the juice.” The action is their principles put into motion, their spiritual beliefs made physical.

In The Final Master the militarization of society is pushing out the old martial art codes. Chen Shi and his dogged, stubborn refusal to compromise is a bulwark to protect the legacy Wing Chun kung fu. Chen Shi rarely makes more than one movement in a fight, staying still as long as possible before flicking out his arms in an an effortless gesture that stuns his opponents (whom he never kills, only incapacitates). He wants his wisdom to be absorbed by the fighters he is vanquishing – each fight a lesson, each loss an education.

In 2009 China Daily described his novels: “Xu prefers to meticulously describe battle scenes and how people undertake strict training. He says he does so according to what he learned during his studies. Xu often strays from main plots, addressing other interesting topics, such as ink painting, calligraphy, antiques and food, to add more dimensions.” His films are extensions of these novels, with simple narratives that drift away into the ether while the action remains gem-like in its precision and clarity. These are rigorous, principled, and remarkably strange films, possessing a recalcitrant, obsessive personality not often seen in action movies of today.