NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL July 15-28, 2022

[Chris Knipp]

JUSTIN CHEUNG, LI HO: LEGENDARY IN ACTION! 大俠Action！(Hong Kong 2022)


A SCENE FROM "BATTLE OF THE SEVEN STAR SWORDS" IN LEGENDARY IN ACTION!

A film about movie nostalgia and the rough and ready nature of the Hong Kong film industry

Legendary in Action! was directed by acting star Cheung Kin Sing, here making his first feature film and playing the director in the movie, Cheung Chi-piu. (The actor reportedly put on weight to convey the sense that his character, frequently seen puffing on a cigarette and looking depressed and disheveled, is going to seed.)

Legendary in Action! oscillates between movie dreams and movie realities, the latter exemplified by scenes showing the rough-shod Hong Kong moviemaking process. We see the director as a child watching old fashioned black and white wuxia films on a little TV, ecstatic. That is the dream, or the birth of it. Now, he is washed up even though still young. He was internationally praised at the Busan Festival, but that's forgotten, and one of the main topics here is money and the lack of it - and most of his funding vanishes when big producers run off and a more intimate one, his friend and producer Chuen (Lee Sang-jung) blows his wad gambling.

Cheung Chi-piu tries to rejuvenate his film by recruiting an aging kung fu movie star, Lung Tin, and a real one, Chen Kuan Tai, plays this role. It was he who played the lead in a series called The Seven Star Sword, which Cheung Chi-piu was particularly inspired by as a boy. Here, nostalgia and reality coincide, and the "meta" quality of this film achieves its best moments.

Legendary in Action! is a movie about making a movie (he Battle of the Seven Star Swords). The main action is the ruckus about organizing and funding and the messy shoots, which rarely seem to go right. It often feels as though the film itself is a mess: the action and continuity aren't altogether under control and the tone is inconsistent. But When Lung Tin, i.e. Chen Kuan Tai, is in action, though his over-energetic moves terrorize other cast members and override the confines of the script, his skill, even at his age, is impressive and fun to watch. Chen Kuan Tai really conveys a sense that in the heyday of old-style kung fu movies, as he keeps saying, cast, crew, and production values were all top-notch, and we believe him when he is scornful about the quality of present-day stunt performers and props and the lack of rigor and dedication in the filmmaking process.

But making a movie about making a movie is tricky, and it's not enough that director Justin Cheung (Cheung Kin Sing) is an experienced actor who knows the cinematic process from the inside: sometimes comedy and realism are at war with each other. Characters abruptly shift. A young woman recruited from a restaurant to be Lung Tin's costar starts out being mercenary and cruelly indifferent, then without explanation becomes his sweet, dedicated helpmate. It's suggested that Lung Tin is developing Alzheimer's, but that doesn't quite compute. Cheung Chi-piu's pregnant wife (Yang Sze Min) gets fed up with his lack of attention (cinema is his passion, still, sort of) and goes back to her mother; later she is back, affectionate and happy. Dialogue needed, if possible, to make these transitions smoother and more plausible.

These are factors that make one less than impressed with Legendary in Action!. But the performance of Chen Kuan Tai leaves an impression and arouses an urge to learn more about how wuxia and Hong KOng action filmmaking have diverged today. The director deserves credit just for taking us to the roughshod Hong Kong low bugdet filmmaking process. We know Wong Kar-wai made his films very rapidly, and perhaps chaotically. Only they turned out to be masterpieces and this didn't.

(For details I am indebted to a DeepL-translated version of an article about this film by Ryan in Chinese on hkfilmblog.)

Legendary in Action!/ 大俠Action! (in Cantonese), 92 mins., was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American Premiere.

Sunday Jul 17, 3:30pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)