Last Friday was a day of days. I spent my entire evening at the cinema! Starting the night off with MY most anticipated film of 2012 (besides Battleship), The Man With The Iron Fists! Right afterwards I saw the animated juggernaut Wreck-It Ralph, but our own Derek Kraneveldt put up a very verbose review of the film, and seemed to like it a bit more than me. But I digress.
The RZA is The Man With The Iron Fists, but surprisingly isn’t the main character in the film!
The Man With The Iron Fists marks famed Wu-Tang member, The RZA (Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) directorial and writing debut with the help of gore master Eli Roth of course. If you’ve been living under a rock (or have been a member of Westboro Baptist Church) and DON’T know who the Wu-Tang Clan are let me give you a quick refresher.
The Wu-Tang Clan is a group of hip-hop pioneers. Revolutionizing the genre in dozens of ways. Be it rhyming style, sampling, lyrical content or starting the modern idea of a rap crew. In short, Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nuthin to fuck with.
Now the first Wu-Tang Clan album is the shining example of the RZA’s love for old Kung-Fu films. Specifically some of the shining stars from the Shaw Brothers studios. If you’ve seen a single Shaw Brothers movie or just love old Chinese Kung-Fu movies then this is right up your alley.
Our film starts off with a bang. Old school freeze frames and Chinese characters that look like moon speak to most of us. This whole film oozes with style and cool, your eyes will not be disappointed. The first scene is a doozy. A test of might, as a fight during a banquet with two rival families have dinner together. A man gets his arms ripped off. Like, from the elbows down. By hand. Right away I knew this was the movie for me.
We are quickly flung forward into the plot, well one of the many plot lines that all end up crashing together. The leader of the Lion Clan, Golden Lion, gets murdered in a scheme devised by his underlings. Silver and Bronze Lion have their leader murdered in order to assume control of the clan to steal a shipment of gold being sent by the Emperor himself. Golden Lion’s son , Zen-Yi (The X-Blade), gets word of his fathers death and immediately goes in pursuit of his killers.
The lesser Lions display the ancient Chinese art of SWAG.
Then we have the Emperors gold itself. It is being moved from the Emperors castle and up to his troops in the North. What use an army has for three carriages of gold eludes me, its just an excuse to add another plot line to the film that include some serious badass and legendary assassins, the Gemini Killers.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Shortly therafter we are introduced to the mysterious stranger character, Russel Crowe. He plays the pun tasticaly named foreigner Jack Knife, who is just looking for some strange and opium…or so it seems. Jack Knife had me wondering about his motives the whole time, and overall was way more enjoyable to watch than The RZA. It was really surprising to find out that Crowe filmed the entirety of his scenes in TEN DAYS.
Mr. Knife should win an Oscar for his use of anal beads on a Chinese whore.
So where do these plot points all end up? WELL JUNGLE VILLAGE OF COURSE! The home of our protagonist (if you can really call him that), the man with the iron fists himself, the Blacksmith. Yeah, our director RZA is the only black guy in the movie…and is a blacksmith…named Blacksmith…and is a runaway slave. The hilarity is palpable. (NOTE: His character appears in Django Unchained, so keep an eye out.) His character is Jungle Village’s blacksmith, and ends up making weapons for pretty much everyone so they can kill everyone else. He is in love with a prostitute that works at the Pink Blossom Brothel, and is slowly working to pay her way out so they can live together in happiness. But after one of the other incomprehensible plot lines finds out he is making weapons for the other, he has something awful done to him and he is left to the aid of Mr. Knife.
The Pink Blossom is run by Madam Blossom herself, Lucy Liu! Her character feels fairly one dimensional and it was like she was mostly channeling her role of O-Ren Ishii from Kill Bill. She wasn’t the BEST performance in the film but DAMN she had a great fucking job. What I wouldn’t give to spend a day in her life.
Madam Blossom and her girls. Really the best LOOKING characters in the film. If you, heheh, know what I mean.
I know what you are thinking, “That is a huge fucking preface!”, and you are right. This is where The Man With The Iron Fists runs into problems. It is obvious at the get go that this film is RZA’s giant love letter to The Shaw Brothers. He ends up trying way to hard to incorporate different themes from many Shaw films and the different story lines end up feeling rushed and you never get a chance to really learn the different characters. It is interesting to learn that the first draft of this film was four hours long, but was cut down by the studio. I imagine the full length version makes a lot more sense and the overly dramatic death scenes more meaningful.
What this film does excel at is the fighting, but the rushed story puts all but two major battles inside the Pink Blossom Brothel in the third act. Everything but the blatantly obvious (I’m looking at you Bautista) was shot traditionally, and I cannot praise this film more for it.
What we are treated to is a “greatest hits” of old kung-fu and wire-fu fight scenes. If you’ve seen The Five Element Ninjas, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Crouching Tiger and The Matrix you know what you are going to get in this film. The disjointed story is held together by the fighting, and RZA got really creative with the fighting.
Crowe showing his Crane style to RZA. Eli Roth looks very disappointed.
The character known as “X-Blade” has a suit of armor that is just a bunch of articulated knives, and is able to stab every living thing with any part of his body. His first battle is against some members of the Rat Clan in a noodle hut, and is a giant homage to the now FAMOUS fight from Samurai Champloo.
My personal favorite scene was the Gemini Killers fight. They have brought the gold to Jungle Village and have rented a hotel for them and their soldiers for the night. Well Lion Clan know its there and they want it. What followed was a brilliant display of old school wire-fu with modern camera techniques. The Gemini Killers use Ying-Yang swords that they link together for some truly amazing moves. Thought I did get a strong hint of The Crippled Masters when the girl got on the shoulders of the male.
I’m really starting to drone on. My final thoughts? This film is brilliant but suffers from a story that meanders from fight to fight. The RZA’s love for Kung-Fu movies from our youth is really obvious, and this movie really pays tribute to some of the greats and not so great films from China. If you spent many a weekend at a Blockbuster looking for some random dubbed Kung-Fu movie, or if you know that Operation Condor is actually the sequel to Armour of God you will not be disappointed with The Man With The Iron Fists.
I hate giving reviews a score on a scale, and prefer to highlight the good and bad points for a product. Your money is very well spent seeing this in the theater. The all original soundtrack featuring Wu-Tang, Kanye, Wiz Khalifa, The Black Keys, My Chemical Romance and many many more really shines. With fantastic fights that salute the great choreographers from our youth, and are full of blood, gore and crazy weapons this film shines on the big screen. Just don’t expect a story worth writing home about.