I have, essentially, seen this movie many times before. CHOYLEEFUT is a decently-made but ultimately uninventive modern martial arts drama that recycles any number of plot devices and storyline clichés in uninteresting fashion, making for a movie that you can't really complain about but can't laud either. Its cast is interesting enough but both the screenplay and the fight scenes are just waiting to be overlooked and forgotten in the history of kung fu cinema.
The story: A young kung fu practitioner (Sammy Hung) bets the school of his father (also his real-life dad Sammo) against a corporate fighting team in martial competition to prove the strength of his family's kung fu.
While the title of the film is apt for the fact that choy lee fut is the exploited fighting style of the story, the renaming doesn't detract from the film since it's treated very superficially: the opening and closing titles provide some background and history of the art, but the movie offers next to no insight of its philosophy or even points out how it differs from other styles (though it does feel confident enough to more or less state that it's better than karate). The film builds up to a series of three matches to determine the school's fate, along the way diving into a boring love triangle tangent, and during this time, most of the characters develop little personality, to the point that I didn't even care who won or lost in the end.
Along with Sammo Hung, fellow Hong Kong cinema icon Yuen Wah is present, though their roles are largely non-fighting and play to their senior status; it was probably an easy shoot for them. Mostly it's a Gen-X cast at the forefront, featuring Kane Kosugi and Dennis To, and like I said before, none of them really have much of a personality in the film. This carries over to the fight scenes: wrangled by Sam Wong, they peak at times with nice moves, athleticism, and minimal wire-fu (particularly during the fight between Kosugi and gweilo Ian Powers) but nonetheless end up all looking the same thanks to flawed rhythm, too much cutting, and an icky habit of slow-motioning reaction shots.
There are a few interesting moments in the film, like when it adopts psychedelic CGI backgrounds for some flashback scenes and the training montage alluding to ROCKY IV. Personally, I like seeing Kane Kosugi perform in general, so his costarring role here was really appreciated. Regardless, the movie really doesn't try for much, with the result that I'll probably forget about it in a fortnight. I can't really justify giving it a lower rating since it's very smoothly produced for its budget, but I can't recommend this to anybody short of die-hard fans of anyone involved.
