TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE (JIAN HUA YAN YU JIANG NAN) A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2000
In the last years of former Yugoslavia, emerging video market became the battleground in the war between video pirates and legitimate video distributors. The latter, being underdog from the start, tried to win the upper hand by delivering less popular, but more exotic and better catalogued merchandise, usually ignored by their pirate competition and missed by those who wanted something else than standard Hollywood material in their video stores. Such policy pleased those who wanted to watch former Yugoslav, European, Indian, Turkish, Russian films or those films belonging to genres unpopular in early 1990s like spaghetti westerns, Italian historical spectacles or kung fu movies from Hong Kong. One of such video collections was made of twelve titles, covering early career of Jackie Chan in 1970s, mostly belonging to the genre of kung fu. I watched them all and, among them, THE KILL WITH INTRIGUE, 1976 kung fu melodrama directed by Lo Wei, was one of the better.
Plot of the film begins when young master Cao Le (played by Jackie Chan) chases away Chin Chien, his pregnant girlfriend and one of palace maidens. Cao Le's cruel act is actually motivated with the desire to save her life, since vicious gang of "Killer Bee" bandits is about to attack Le's family estate. They arrive, led by Chin Chang Yin, woman who had her face scarred as a child by Le's father, and kill everyone. Life of Cao Le is spared and he goes on the long and perilous journey in order to re-unite with Chin Chien, who had met his friend Chin Chun. While Cao Le tries to reach both of them, he is constantly tormented by Chin Chang Yin, which took unusual interest in his plight.
For some people, kung fu films are by definition formulaic, with cardboard characters and plots being nothing more than cheap excuse for totally unrealistic fight scenes. For me, kung fu is a specifically national (Chinese) genre, and, as such, it has specific genre rules that, nevertheless, allow their makers precious creative freedom, the very same way different authors make different westerns. TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE, with simple yet complicated plot that deals with romance, friendship, unrequited love, betrayal and revenge, is one of such example. Completely devoid of humour, script by Kung Lu, gives opportunity to Lo Wei to engage in straightforward drama with believable characters. It is also opportunity for us to see Jackie Chan, actor almost always associated with comedy, in a serious dramatic roles. Dramatic scenes in this film are powerful, compensating sometimes overlong and unrealistic fight scenes, plagued with bad editing and even worse special effects. Musical score is sometimes corny, as well as some romantic scenes, but as a whole, film works, giving those accustomed to kung fu films, more than average quality entertainment. Greatest disservice to this film is done by poor English dubbing and even worse pan & scan editing.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
Review written on January 2nd 2000
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax Fido: 2:381/100 E-mail: dragan.antulov@st.tel.hr E-mail: drax@purger.com E-mail: dragan.antulov@altbbs.fido.hr
Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://film.purger.com
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