A Vingança do Tigre Branco

If I'm being honest, this movie peaks right near the start and fails to completely live up to the insanity of that first action scene. It opens with such a simple, brutal, thrilling, and kind of darkly funny brawl, and I was prepared for something genuinely masterful if it maintained that energy.

The rest of the action is good, but never as great as at the start. The whole movie gets more ridiculous, surreal, and even fantastical as it goes along, and I thought most of the ride was decent. It made things pretty unpredictable, and that snappy Yuen Woo-Ping directed action is always fun to watch.

If you're looking for a slightly less cartoonish and slightly more brutal Kung Fu Hustle kind of film that also has a premise you might find in a slasher movie, I could recommend Dreadnaught.

Even though the movie had stereotype characters like the cross-eye goofy cop or the bad guy with the facial flaw, Dreadnaught also had some way cool scenes. If you can bear sitting through the slow, run of the mill parts, you'll be rewarded with 3 major scenes [in order of awesomeness]: 1) the fighting Dragons 2) the opera theatre fight and 3) the tailor. It's a slapstick comedy too, so you'll have a few laughs, too. I just don't get the title.

In a hotel room in Kunming, China, 2005, four western tourists were getting ready to go out for that day's restaurant round, then this movie was on by accident - and we couldn't stop watching! We actually laughed at the lame slapstick, the "lion dance" was terrific, the energy - as mentioned in another review - was perfect throughout! Excellent work.

Now I am at IMDb trying to check out this film, you see, we had to go 15 minutes before the ending to get to the restaurants before they closed, which was surprisingly hard to do with a random Chinese kung fu movie. We made sure to snap up the movie title, I'm going to watch this all the way.

Then I see here it's from 1981 - which wasn't expected at all. Very good film, might look like your classic low-quality run of the mill kung-fu, but believe me, this is a notch above the rest!

Dreadnaught features Yuen Woo Ping's extreme talent for choreography and action direction. Fan's of any of his other work will no doubt be very pleased to sit through this oddly titled film. Also, fans of Yuen Biao (that's me), will also be very happy to pick this one up, (although, like "Circus Kids" his role in the film could be argued as criminally underused).

Again, set in Ming Dynasty China, this film sees the plight of Mousy (Biao), who happens to be a very shy, in-confident, and even cowardly laundry worker. His nature is revealed when we witness him trying to collect laundry debts from various townspeople - they push him around and give him nothing.

All the while, an evil and eccentric killer "White Tiger" takes pleasure in terrorising anyone who happens to be around, and, unfortunately for Mousy, he seems to be high on Tiger's list. But, again, like most Kung Fu films, it's not so much what is done, but rather how they do it. Thankfully, Dreadnaught does well in it's direction and choreography, but it does not excel.

Credits list Biao as the star, but I believe Leung Ka-Yan (who is Mousy's older brother in the film) deserves equal billing - they certainly have equal screen-time. "Foon", played by Ka-Yan, is a more well-rounded martial artist, and a student of the legendary Wong Fei Hung (played brilliantly and hilariously by Kwan Tak-Hing a la "Magnificent Butcher). The scene involving a rather violent tailor is worth the sitting alone.

Dreadnaught seems more of an unfocused film as compared to Woo Ping's other work(s). "Drunken Master" for example had a clear, snappy and balanced screenplay. We knew where we were supposed to be at in terms of all the plot elements. Dreadnaught fails on these grounds, and it's action sequences do not mesh pleasurably with the dialog as they do in Drunken Master.

I was expecting a "Snake in the Eagle's Shadow" for Yuen Biao, but rather, I see this film as three main action sequences starring various cast, tied together with the broad characterisation of Mr. White Tiger. It is by far one of the better Kung Fu films out there, but I'm afraid Yuen Woo Ping's other works do the same thing but better.

This film begins so similarly to Young Master that I almost felt I was rewatching it. However, to my surprise, it matched and surpassed the classic Jackie Chan movie by miles. The Dragon/Lion fight scene is worth the admission price alone, and it only gets better after that. The comedy is almost Martin/Lewis, and the fighting is amazingly choreographed. Anything less would be your standard Kung Fu fare.

Highly recommended.