Monday 13 June 2022

Man of Tai Chi (2013)

 This is a dreadful film. I saw it this week (in 2022) and thought it was a new movie, but it seems it was released in 2013. I couldn't even bring myself to watch it in one siting. I thought the fight scenes would be good, and many of them are, but the connective tissue is so awful that I just had to stop a few times and then pick it up later, or the next day.

So many cliches.

Another anoying thing is that it appears on Netflix as an English language movie, but half the dialogue is in one of several Chinese dialects, so I had to manually turn on subtitles for those bits and then ended up leaving them on for the English parts too, as it's too much hassle to flip-flop. I'm sure presenting only subtitles for the non-English parts is a solved problem... but it just didn't work here.

It's a real mish-mash of movie types. I couldn't figure out what it was trying to do. What was the message? Who were the characters? Did Keanu Reeves have to direct the movie just to get to play a bad guy? He kind of sucked at that... since he played him almost exactly as Neo from the Matrix.

Oh, another annoying thing on the Netflix front (which may not be their fault) is that the description says this is a Kung-fu movie... when the whole point is that Tiger is adapting Tai Chi not Kung-fu - the clue is in the title, after all.

I think the worst part was where the old Chi = Magic myth was trotted out as the ultimate lesson. Tiger's master manages to bruise him a bit with a "magic" strike and then Tiger kills Keanu with a more powerful version (sorry, SPOILERS, not that it makes any difference as you see that coming a mile off).

The same emotional content was done better by "The Blues Brothers" (!) and the fighter's journey was done better by many, many other martial arts films, including "The Matrix".


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