Fist of Legend (1994)

Fist of Legend arrives from 1994 Hong Kong with a pedigree that requires no embellishment: Jet Li producing and starring as Chen Zhen, Gordon Chan directing, Yuen Woo-ping arranging the fights. It is a remake of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury, and it sets its story in Shanghai in 1914, with Japanese troops pressing in and a martial arts school nursing a poisoned master. The punches land with a weight that later Hollywood productions spent years trying to imitate. The Wachowskis watched this and hired the choreographer for The Matrix. That is the entire cultural argument, and it is sufficient.

An audit of the film's progressive content returns a clean sheet. The nationalism on display is a 1914 Sino-Japanese conflict, a matter of historical grievance and national honor, not the systemic racial framework we now expect from studio product. Mitsuko, the Japanese student who loves Chen, functions as a romantic catalyst and an alibi, and the film has no interest in interrogating patriarchy through her. The philosophy exchanged between Chen and Fumio Funakoshi, that martial arts is personal development and that a gun defeats any fist, is a Bruce Lee-era observation about combat, not a lecture on contemporary social arrangements. Nobody pauses the fight to explain the audience's obligations to society.

The Miramax dub, which rewrote the ending so Chen could declare his love instead of asking where the war with Japan would break out, is a fascinating act of translation vandalism, though it is commercial cowardice and not ideology. The film holds a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which tells us critics admire a well-thrown kick. It is a lean, brutal, beautifully choreographed piece of entertainment with no interest in instructing anyone about anything. A rare vintage. We score it accordingly and pour ourselves something else.