The Movie:

For those not up to speed, famous Chinese folk hero Chen Zhen has hit the big screen before, most famously in Bruce Lee's Fist Of Fury from 1972 but also in Fist Of Legend with Jet Li in 1994. Donnie Yen first played the role in a Chinese television series also called Fist Of Fury and this latest incarnation, also starring Yen in the role, basically picks up where that series left off.

When the film begins, we meet up with Chen as he and some other Chinese men are helping the Allied forces push back the Germans attempting to take France in the First World War. Chen's bravery is put front and center when he makes a daring attack on a German machine gun nest and saves the day. Cut to Shanghai where, a few years after the war, he spends a lot of time at a night club called Casablanca owned and operated by his friend Liu Yutian (Anthony Wong). The fact that a gorgeous chanteuse named Kiki (Shu Qi) is always there and showing an interest in him doesn't hurt matters either. Things are going well for Chen, but this all starts to change when the Japanese forces, lead by General Chikiraishi (Kohata Ryuichi), start flexing their muscle and taking advantage of the population.

When it turns out that the Japanese have come up with and started acting on a 'murder list' of Chinese citizens they'd like to get rid of, Chen Zhen dons a black mask and a black suit and hits the streets to show the occupying Japanese that the Chinese will not take their abuse lying down. While the Japanese are trying to figure out who is under the mask and how to stop him, Chen Zhen is trying to figure out who is helping the Japanese and trying to organize the Chinese resistance movement.

You've got to keep in mind that Legend Of The Fist: The Return Of Chen Zhen was originally intended for a Chinese audience, so you'll have to forgive the fact that it is absolutely drenched with nationalist pride from start to finish. This is understandable enough, and the film makes some interesting points as it waves the flag (early on we see the Chinese fight for the Allies only to see the Europeans basically ignore them once the war is over and the Japanese move in), but subtle is not exactly an appropriate way of describing the film - this picture is about as subtle as a kick in the groin. That said, subtlety probably wasn't high on the list of director Andrew Lau's agenda nor, for that matter, was realism. While there's plenty of attention to detail paid here to the lavish sets and impressive costumes used throughout the film, the fight scenes (choreographed by Yen) aren't all that grounded in reality even if they are ridiculously entertaining.

While on a visual level Legend Of The Fist is quite an accomplishment, the story is hard to connect to. The characters don't develop all that much and subplots, the most notable being a romance which blossoms between Chen Zhen and Kiki, tend to appear and disappear without much rhyme or reason. At one point an important character is captured, beaten and left incarcerated, and in the next scene he's resting safely in bed having escaped or been rescued somehow. There are some sizeable plot holes here, and there are pacing issues as well. The film is about twenty minutes longer than it needs to be and there are some lengthy stretches where those hoping for non-stop martial arts mayhem will be left unimpressed - until the next action scene kicks in, at which point the movie will spring back to life again.

Maybe it's too easy to ask too much of the film. When you think about it, this is a movie where Donnie Yen dons a black patent leather suit and mask and zips around town evading bullets and kicking Japanese guys through newspaper offices, and where our star does his best Bruce Lee impersonation in the big finale. This is a movie where Anthony Wong plays a noble guy, a movie where the Japanese are pure evil and a movie where cars made in the fifties appear in its 1920s setting. While it's almost a certainty that Chinese audiences will get more out of the story than western audiences, it's hard to see Legend Of The Fist as much more than a fun, if erratically paced, popcorn movie and on that level it succeeds just fine.

Video:

Legend Of The Fist: The Return Of Chen Zhen arrives on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 2.35.1 widescreen 1080p high definition transfer which generally looks very good despite a few quirks. Colors are, for the most part, beautiful looking though sometimes tweaked just ever so slightly with some sepia tone filtering. This, in a few scenes, results in skin tones looking a little bit orange. There are also some scenes that show a fair bit of softness, though this and the previously mentioned color issues are likely intentional on the part of the filmmakers. Those issues aside, detail can sometimes be very impressive here, texture as well - you just don't get it in every frame or every scene. Close ups are generally quite revealing while contrast is solid as are black levels. Some mild edge enhancement rears its head now and again but never to the point where it completely sours the visuals. Overall, the image is good - it's just not quite perfect.