Top Fighter

Good martial arts movie over view that is a good mix of interviews, narration and fight clips. The film gives some background on the history of martial arts in China before moving on to a loose overview of martial arts on film. Focusing on the various stars that have emerged in the genre over the years the film is arranged approximate (but not complete) order in which an actor rose to prominence. The interviews are with people like Gordon Liu, Jackie Chan, Jim Kelly, Bruce Li and other stars whose clips we see as they talk about making movies. There is also a long segment on Bruce Lee where former students are interviewed. Entertaining, this film compliments nicely some of the better films on the subject Cinema of Vengeance and IFC film on Kung Fu films by fleshing out some of the people only touched on in those documentaries, as well as showing lots of extended film clips of action sequences that are actually worth watching. Worth keeping an eye out for, especially since it can be found in bargain DVD bins for under five bucks.

Not much to say about this, other than it seems to be an attempt to fit as many names, and video samples as possible into a less than two hour documentary, and we do get a lot of names. From the obvious (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jean Claude Van Damme) to some of the lesser-known stars.

The basic format is to focus on one star at a time, talk about them for a bit, and then show a sample of them performing with a voice over. There's a short interview with Jackie Chan, and it is pretty cool, but the best bits are the ones about some of the lesser-known stars who deserve more attention. I enjoyed the segment about Jimmy Wang Yu (star of the One-Armed Boxer movies), and how the narrator tells about how it "wasn't unusual" to hear about Wang Yu actually getting into large fights off-screen on the streets. There's a bit about perpetual bad guy, Bolo Yeung, but not enough, and the same goes for Gordon Liu (who recently had two roles in 'Kill Bill').

There isn't much to this documentary, it really is an excuse to show a bunch of video clips from old kung-fu movies, but I'm not complaining.

6/10

This is very much the same as lots of other 'documentaries' which actually consist of fight scenes, interviews, and the odd bit of voice-over.

As ever, Jackie Chan's interview is interesting, because the guy gives good interviews -- the bit about Bruce Lee is also neat, some old footage I'd not seen before.

The most worthwhile thing about this, though, is the listing of little-known fighters, some of whom really deserve greater stardom. (oh, and a hilarious trailer for a Bolo Yeung film called "Chinese Hercules"..)

....it does not tell you which movie each short clip is coming from! Would it be so difficult to have a title card at the start of each clip, just like those they have for the names of each person who appears on the screen? Sure, all the titles scroll by at the closing credits, but I doubt if even the most hardened martial arts fans would be able to match each title to the right clip. The other problem with "Top Fighter" is a problem common to many of these "compilation" documentaries - the compiled scenes (here, the fight scenes) lose some of their impact when they're taken out of their film's context. Other than that, this documentary does cover a lot of ground, and a wide variety of stars, from big names like Jet Li and Jackie Chan (it was made in 1995, so no references to their Hollywood success) to lesser-known on-screen fighters like Leung Kar Yan and Tan Tao Liang (who is now a martial arts teacher), and there are also some revealing interview bits. (**1/2)