Review: Shaolin

Set in the 1920s, Andy Lau stars as ruthless Chinese General Hou, who kills his mentor/rival General Sung, but finds himself betrayed by his own lieutenant Tsao (Nicholas Tse). Ultimately this results in the loss of his daughter and the loss of the love of his wife (Fan Bingbing). Wounded both physically and spiritually, he is nursed back to health by a Shaolin temple cook (Jackie Chan) and the brethren, who operate like martial-arts variants of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, trying to help the poor and downtrodden by feeding them rice they steal from the rich and powerful. The once seemingly heartless warlord (he even shoots a surrendered enemy in the back) begins to take a different outlook on life and on the do-gooders he once thumbed his nose at. Meanwhile, Tsao has risen to power in his absence and is a far more ruthless warlord than the once ambitious Hou ever was, and is trading arms for Chinese treasures with foreigners. It seems he has trained his apprentice all too well!

This 2011 mixture of “The Last Samurai” (or at least the Richard Chamberlain miniseries “Shogun”) and “The 36^th Chamber of Shaolin”, from director Benny Chan isn’t bad, but it would’ve been even better if not for one unforgivable flaw. It wants to use plot elements and character transitions from “The Last Samurai”, but the lead character played by Andy Lau simply doesn’t mesh with that. Although not the biggest villain in the film, he is indeed set-up immediately as a villain, before spending the rest of the film finding redemption. Sure, he’s seen as a good husband and father, but lots of bad guys live double lives, it doesn’t make them good people or likeable. The transition in between villainy and redemption isn’t quite non-existent, but it’s not satisfactorily shown either, and more importantly, it’s not credible. This is through no fault of the highly underrated and versatile Lau, who is excellent as always. In “The Last Samurai”, Tom Cruise’s character was already a miserable, disillusioned drunken mess, but Lau, although grieving, has far less reason to reject his beliefs and allegiances than Cruise did, and I just didn’t buy it.

Other than that, this is an interesting and sometimes arresting film, and Lau is absolutely terrific in quite a different role for him. Jackie Chan is pretty good in a somewhat small role, but playing the only Shaolin monk to wear a freaking skull cap is just stupid (Apparently he’s the least committed monk in history, no wonder he’s just the cook). It’s such a trivial role, why would they give it to Chan if he wasn’t willing to shave his head? They also give him a few brief bits of martial arts comedy, despite his character claiming not to know any martial arts. That’s cute, though, and the stuff he does is somewhat believable for his character (They relate it to his job as cook).

The action overall is pretty good, though this isn’t exactly a flashy soap opera-esque wuxia epic like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or “House of Flying Daggers”. Sure, there’s plenty of fighting and it’s pretty lavishly done, but this is more internal drama and free of the romantic love triangle stuff found in a lot of wuxia epics. This is a watchable film with fine work by Andy Lau, but it could’ve been better. I just found the character transition too unlikely to accept it. The screenplay is by Cheung Chi-kwong, Zhang Tan, Chan Kam-cheong, Wang Qiuyu, and Alan Yuen. You’d think that with a whopping five screenwriters, someone would’ve seen there was something iffy about the story, but obviously not.

Rating: C+