La revanche de Wang Yu

The movie starts with a song. There will be many more songs. Our singer is looking for her father. Jimmy Wang Yu is looking for the man who killed his father. He defends the singer from the protection gang and then ends up working for them. He explains this is his plan to find the killer.

I also watched this on the video CD. I'll add to the other excellent review by commenting on the action. As a fan of martial arts movie of the golden age from 1967 to 1984 I watched this movie because watching all of Jimmy Wang Yu's movies is part of the job. In this movie he is quite the fashion show. I wish the 1970s styles for men's clothing would return. I love the colors and the collars.

Most of the fights are just beatings. Jimmy finishes off almost every opponent with one punch or kick. Ying-Chieh Han (a.k.a. The Big Boss) gives him a bit of a fight. From about the middle of the movie the story starts setting up a big fight to come at the casino. The casino looks like they rented some cheap office space and rolled in a green felt topped table. Perhaps they blew most of the budget on cigars? Until the final fight no weapons or improvised props were used, it was all hand to hand. There was nothing special to be seen, it was all basic punch, block, side step, kick. The power and focus was mostly there but it quickly became the same thing over and over again.

I think the current rating here is way high and I consider it just average for the year and genre.

From Golden Harvest studios and infamous director Lo Wei, comes an early modern thriller starring the hardest working man of Hong Kong cinema (at the time), the great Jimmy Wang Yu. Looking fresh faced, handsome and very stylish, Wang kicks ass in typical Wang fashion, in a host of fast and furious fight scenes directed by kung fu veteran Han Ying Chieh, who also plays one of the bad guys of the flick!

A Man Called Tiger was rumoured to be the third collaboration between Bruce Lee and director Lo Wei (with Lee going on to make his own Way Of The Dragon), and as much as I love Jimmy Wang Yu, would loved to have seen the alternate version with the little dragon. While not the most graceful of movers, Wang Yu's raw and fast energy works for this thriller with plenty of impressive moments and moves, often more violent than usual.

The fantastic James Tien co-stars as Wang Yu's friend who aids him in his search to find his fathers killers, getting in on the action when he can. The film has a great cast overall with a young Lam Ching Ying (Mr. Vampire) popping up throughout as a thug, as well as any other familiar faces of HK cinema. It makes a change seeing them in this Kyoto setting rather than the over-used 70's Hong Kong cityscape that so many other releases of the time were using. Even director Lo Wei himself gets a cameo...

With this US VHS version coming in at a fast 76 minutes, and with a fight almost every 5 minutes, A Man Called Tiger passed pretty quick. I do believe the Fortune Star HK release is 100 minutes long, but at time of writing I have yet to get that version and would say it probably slows the pace somewhat!

With little explanation to some characters and a bit of a convoluted plot, the film has enough fun fights and great stunts, and closes with a pretty sweet, violent heavy, action packed battle with Jimmy Wang Yu in top gear, kicking ass like he means it - and as a martial arts film, that's pretty much why we want to watch it, isn't it?

Overall: A decent, martial arts thriller that entertains and makes Wang Yu look the slickest he's ever looked, even if some of it makes no sense!

The Golden Harvest production of A MAN CALLED TIGER (1973) was reportedly planned as a Bruce Lee vehicle, but when Lee went off to make his own film, WAY OF THE DRAGON, director Lo Wei (who'd directed Lee's previous starring films) proceeded to make it with Jimmy Wang Yu (ONE-ARMED BOXER) instead. It's an odd film with a meandering plot, a quartet of female characters who are all inexplicably drawn to the stone-faced lead, often at risk of their own lives, and various continuity gaps. It's also set in Kyoto, Japan, although I never saw anything in the scenery that looked like Kyoto. There's one car chase through a neighborhood of Japanese-looking homes, so maybe they got some pick-up shots in Japan, but everything else looks like it could have been filmed in Hong Kong, including a scene on a cable car from the mainland to an offshore island. The cast is filled with familiar Hong Kong actors (James Tien, Maria Yi, Tien Feng, Lam Ching Ying, Han Ying Chieh, Li Kun) playing mostly Japanese characters and I doubt Golden Harvest would have paid to ship them all to Japan. The only lead performer I could identify as Japanese is Okada Kawai, who plays Ayako, a young woman singing in a nightclub who has traveled from Hokkaido to search for her missing father. She sings in Mandarin, the language everyone speaks here. There isn't a single syllable of Japanese spoken on the soundtrack.

Jimmy Wang Yu plays a martial artist who has come to Japan to investigate the suicide of his father and the disappearance of millions of yen donated by "overseas Chinese" for a cause that's never quite spelled out. (If it was explained, I didn't catch it because the Fortune Star VCD I watched for this review offers only burned-in white subtitles often framed against a white background, making them unreadable.) Ayako's search for her father strikes a chord with Jimmy and he winds up helping her. Emi (Maria Yi), a bar hostess at the club where Ayako sings, has an absent father also, who is believed to be in Thailand, so he's not officially classified as "missing," although his mysterious whereabouts become an issue later in the film as well. The beautiful landlady at Jimmy's hotel gets the hots for him and comes on strong, although she's rebuffed at first. Another woman enters the picture when Jimmy confronts gang boss Yamamoto (Tien Feng) over his father's true fate. This woman, identified in the subtitles as "Leiko," although I'm guessing they mean "Reiko," is Yamamoto's mistress and helps Jimmy out of a couple of jams and even waits for him, undressed, in his hotel room at night and declares her love for him even though they'd only met that afternoon. I can't identify the actresses who play the landlady and "Leiko." Third-billed Maria Yi, as Emi, has a smaller part than they do.

Jimmy fights off thugs working for gang boss Shimizu when they show up to collect protection money from the nightclub. Shimizu then offers Jimmy a job as muscle to fend off the Yamamoto gang's incursions into his territory and Jimmy accepts in order to get closer to Yamamoto's gambling operation and its possible link to his father's death. The plot, as convoluted as it is, gives Jimmy plenty of opportunities for fight scenes, some of which have imaginative settings, such as one set in an abandoned factory, although they're usually pretty far-fetched and involve Jimmy standing alone against multiple attackers. In one battle, Jimmy gets slashed in several spots by assorted ax-wielding opponents and is soon covered in blood, yet he insists, "I'm fine," when asked if he's all right. Huh?

There's not a lot of logic in this film. Jimmy is well-dressed throughout, changing jackets, ties and suits frequently even in the midst of long stretches where he never goes near his hotel room. At one point, he tells Ayako to return a wad of cash taken from a Chinese restaurant owner (James Tien) whom Jimmy, on Shimizu's orders, had beaten up and forced to pay protection. He tells Ayako not to tell the man where she got the money and not to tell anyone she's doing this, yet he hands her the money and gives her the instructions in full view of dozens of people in the nightclub. Later, he tells Yamamoto's mistress, who is stealing money from Yamamoto for him, to meet him alone with the case of money outside a closed station at night--not a good plan if you're concerned about safety and secrecy. The film is full of lapses like this that make absolutely no sense.

Okada Kawai sings two songs in the opening sequence, one sad and slow, one fast and upbeat. She actually has a pleasant voice and style. She was a performer on Japanese children's TV and I'm guessing her own voice was used for this. IMDb says this film has a 70-minute running time. The print on the Fortune Star VCD is 100 minutes long and the on-screen title is A MAN CALLED TIGER. If you're a fan of the genre, this film will hold a certain peculiar fascination, due to its setting, its cast, and its position in Jimmy Wang Yu's filmography. I wouldn't recommend it to others, though.