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Of the many forms of kung fu, Drunken Fist is one of the most recognizable and visually interesting. Practitioners seem to stagger and reel about, striking from odd angles and dodging attacks with peculiar fluidity. It’s also very cinematically friendly, and it’s been explored in numerous martial arts films over the last half-century. True Legend recounts the creation of the style by a man known as Beggar Su through a mix of fantasy and historical fiction.
The first two thirds of the film stick largely to fantasy. Su (Vincent Zhou) and his foster brother, Yuan (Andy On), participate in a daring military rescue, after which Su is offered the governorship of a province. Preferring to return to his wife and son, he declines the offer and nominates Yuan in his stead. Years later, when Yuan returns, he’s become a different man, a brutal military leader in possession of the dangerous Five Venom Fists technique. Murdering Su’s father, and leaving Su and his wife for dead, Yuan takes Su’s son, Feng.
Badly hurt after his battle with Yuan, Su and his wife come into the care of a reclusive herbalist and wine-maker (Michelle Yeoh) in the mountains. The kung fu master begins to recover his strength under the tutelage of two mysterious strangers, who may or may not be merely figments of his strained mind. Soon, Su must recover his sanity and strength to reclaim Feng from Yuan—and then to fight an encroaching foreign influence in China, in order to claim his place as one of the country’s eminent heroes.
True Legend marks master fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping’s return to the director’s chair. As should be expected, the fights are top-notch. From the opening large-form battle on wooden bridges over a bottomless abyss to the confrontation between Su and Yuan that takes place partly in the narrow vertical shaft of a well, Yuen uses some inventive staging and choreography to keep moving the story forward while offering plenty of action eye-candy.
But while the fights shine, the story suffers from a lack of overall cohesion. The first two thirds, detailing the rivalry between Su and Yuan, hold together as a solid, if somewhat standard, martial arts fable. A good man is betrayed by his brother and must learn new skills in order to balance the scales. But the shift between this story, rooted in dynastic fantasy, to a tournament in which Su defeats several white colonial wrestlers while demonstrating the power of his new kung fu form, seems to come out of the blue.
For Chinese audiences who already know the legends of Beggar Su, this probably doesn’t seem quite so problematic, but an audience in the U.S. will be left wondering where this new plot, including a cameo from the late David Carradine, suddenly came from. The Blu-ray includes a couple featurettes that help to explain the mismatched stories, but it remains a pretty glaring flaw. That said, the tournament at least offers Yuen another stage to demonstrate his prowess at putting different styles and performers together to thrilling effect.
For those looking to watch a master craftsman at work, True Legend is an effective reminder of why Yuen Woo Ping remains at the top of the list of martial arts choreographers. Still, I wish that more care had been taken in crafting the narrative, which simply lacks the precision and power of the performers who carry it out.
