Man of Tai Chi (2013)

Man of Tai Chi arrives from 2013 with the modest ambition of being a martial arts picture and largely fulfills it. Keanu Reeves directs for the first time, casting himself as Donaka Mark, a wealthy sadist who stages illegal fights for paying spectators, and Tiger Chen as the working-class Tai Chi disciple he cultivates into a killer. The choreography is grounded and legible, the camera stays back, and the whole enterprise has the reassuring texture of something made thirty years earlier. As a piece of social commentary, it is nearly inert.

Where the film shows a flicker of class consciousness, it keeps its voice down. Donaka's operation is a gladiatorial circuit for the rich, and he engineers the demolition order on Tiger's temple to force a decent man into the ring. That is an argument about who owns the violence, and it lands because the film stages it instead of announcing it. Karen Mok's Inspector Suen Jing carries the police investigation with competence and no ceremony; the film never stops to congratulate itself for it. The cast is almost entirely Chinese and Hong Kong performers, which is simply what a Beijing-set martial arts film requires, not a statement.

The film offers no gender thesis, no racial argument, no environmental concern, no reconsideration of history, and no interest in bodies except as instruments of combat. Tai Chi philosophy drifts through the dialogue, inner peace against violence, but the film trusts its fists to make the point. We are left with a lean, old-fashioned genre exercise that treats its ideas as subtext and its audience as adults. Refreshing, in its way. Rare, too.