Apparently, 78% of the critics who reviewed Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster praised the film. This is an example of why review-aggregating sites like Rotten Tomatoes are useless. The Grandmaster is an execrable film, bad in some astonishing ways. And I say this as someone who admires Wong Kar Wai and think that several of his earlier films -- particularly Chung King Express and Happy Together -- are very fine movies. The Grandmaster is so bad that it seems to be some kind of perverse parody of a martial arts film. It is so bad that it casts an unflattering retrospective light on the director's earlier movies. How could someone so gifted make something this idiotic? Were his earlier films also a bit silly?
In effect, the movie is a prequel to another well-known picture and a sort of origin film. However, I won't name that picture yet and will withold the identity of the superhero whose origin the movie shows us. The Grandmaster begins with the assertion that in Mainland Chinese martial arts schools are divided between the south and the north, the border being the Yangtze River. A handsome middle-aged fellow with the improbable name of Ip Man practices southern Kung Fu from his hometown of Fushan. Some interlopers from the North with allegedly different styles of fighting -- it looks all the same to an uninitiate (lots of skidding with the feet and karate chops) -- challenge Ip Man. In true super-hero fashion, he beats everyone up, sometimes hacking down dozens of assailants at a time. The greatest fighter in the north is someone called Gong Yutien. Ip Man has some kind of aphorism-spouting battle with this guy -- the two men exchange fortune cookie slogans. Apparently, the verbal combat results in a draw. (Who knows? the subject has something to do with cookies itself and the fight concludes with a giant close-up of the proverbial cookie crumbling.) Gong Yutien's comely daughter, Gong Er ("Gonger"?) comes south to Fushan and challenges Ip Man to a fight. They exchange kicks and karate chops for a few minutes. Here the film faces a challenge -- for plot purposes, Ip Man has to lose the bout, although he is incapable of being beaten. Since Kung Fu requires exactitude in placing one's kicks and chops, and since previous fights have featured dozens of shots of unfortunate attackers hurled through windows, smashing down doors and crashing through furniture, the condition placed on this combat is that neither of the duelists will damage anything on the film-set. (All of this fighting takes place in a dimly lit, gilded space without any precise geometry -- it's just a black void with some intense highlights. This is supposed to be the Golden Pavilion, a brothel frequented by belligerent Kung Fu Masters who are always brawling here; the place is a little like the assassin's hotel in John Wick where various murderers are constantly slaughtering one another.) For some reason, Ip Man and Gong Er fight on a stairway surrounding a central atrium. About half of the combat is aerial and, when Ip Man reaches out to save Gong Er from a bad fall, he slips over the edge of the balustrade and the force of his impact pulls a screw out of a floor-board. And, so, he is deemed to be the loser of the duel. The fight is staged like a witless version of a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dance, featuring lots of cheek to cheek waltzing between flurries of amplified kicks and karate chops. Of course, Ip Man and Gong Er fall in love, notwithstanding the fact that they are trying to maim one another. (And notwithstanding that Ip Man is married and, apparently, has several children.) Gong Er departs for the North. The Japanese invade the South and eight years of privation ensues. (We expect Ip Man to join the resistance to fight the Japanese, but, apparently, his bellicose ambitions don't extend to fighting for a cause or, indeed, anything useful.) After the War, the film now shifts into romantic mode and, of course, Ip Man's wife has to be eliminated (his kids apparently died of starvation). Ip Man goes to Hong Kong to teach his special brand of Kung Fu -- it's call Chun Wang. The wife remains in Fushan is now out of the movie. Ip Man's venture in Hong Kong involves a number of fights in which the hero has to best rival teachers -- no problem and easily accomplished. Meanwhile, Gong Er's father has been killed and the villainous Ma San now rules the North -- he was a Japanese collaborator. There's a spectacular scene on a glacier (it's always snowing in the North) as Gong Er carries her father's ashes -- where? We don't know -- she's just marching across the ice with color-coded army of thugs behind her. Gong Er has acquired a factotum who runs around with a literal monkey on his back a bit like a parrot on a pirate's shoulder. Later, Gong Er fights Ma San at a train station where the world's longest train is rushing by the platform, perilously close to the combatants. Gong Er uses her father's trademark move called "Old Monkey Hangs up the Badge" and manages to shove Ma San into the speeding train. This kills him, although not before he can deliver a sort of soliloquy as he lies dying in the snow. Gong Er goes to Hong Kong where she practices medicine. There Ip Man looks her up and they sort of renew their romance. By this point, the movie has become deliriously romantic and, even, uses the ravishing "Deborah's theme" from Ennio Morricone's Once Upon a Time in America to underscore the doomed love affair. Gong Er has become an opium addict due to self-medicating her pain resulting from the lethal fight with Ma San. (This is the only fight resulting in a death -- the rest of the mayhem is all weirdly bloodless.) She dies without passing on to the world her father's version of Kung Fu, called the "64 Hands." She has made a vow to the Buddha that if divine providence grants her the right to kill Ma San, she will never marry, have children, or teach martial arts. Ip Man continues teaching Kung Fu in Hong Kong. He has a very young student who shows promise. This student turns out to be Bruce Lee, the film's big reveal at its end. The viewer has to rub his eyes in astonishment. This huge epic spanning twenty five years or more is really just a vehicle to introduce to the world a minor-league movie star most famous for something called Fists of Fury. (And mocked as a poseur in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). It's as if a film surveyed the Civil Rights movement for thirty years and ended with the declaration that this saga made possible the career of Kevin Hart or Redd Fox (Hart is too famous -- Redd Fox is better.) The reader might think that I have labored to make the film seem ridiculous -- in fact, the actual picture is far sillier than this summary suggests.
Wong Kar Wei is incapable of making a film that is visually uninteresting although he almost succeeds with the tedious fighting sequences and gloomy interiors in The Grandmaster. The picture is stylized -- it's aesthetic seems to be derived from Chinese lacquer-work. Except for the scenes on the CGI glacier, everything appears to happen indoors in a jet black void. The ebony enamel coats everything with a sleek shining surface in which faces or objects are highlighted and glow as if suffused with shining amber. Since the interior spaces are ill-defined to the point of being completely illegible, the fighting makes no sense -- there's no topography for the characters to traverse. In fact, the combat scenes are dull to the point that I fell asleep during several of the protracted fights -- you can't tell what's happening and the action is fragmented into tiny, meaningless snippets of blow and counter-blow. I assume someone carefully choreographed the battles but this doesn't translate into anything exciting because the footage is so fragmented and cubist. The dialogue is completely idiotic -- for instance, when we see Gong Er as a child watching her father fight in another snowy studio landscape, she says in a voice-over: "The music most familiar to me was the sound of bones breaking" -- this is her explanation of why she never became an opera star notwithstanding having a beautiful voice. There's nothing like acting in the film-- we just get enormous Sergio Leone-style close-ups of completely immobile and impassive faces. The shots are beautiful but inexpressive. The movie was apparently cut by 15 minutes by Harvey Weinstein's group that distributed the picture in the United States. The narrative elides most interesting or tragic events -- for instance, the destruction of Ip Man's family during the War -- and titles are used to bridge gaps where some sort of meaningful narrative should be. At the end of the film, we are supposed to lament that Gong Er never passed on her father's trademark 64 Hands-style of fighting (with its signature reverse whammy move called "Old Monkey Hangs up the Badge). Try as I might I couldn't work up any emotional response to that cultural loss -- and, in any event, there are innumerable other fighting styles with similarly exotic names that have survived. Indeed, at the end of the film, in a jocular aside that is completely inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the film, Ip Man looks right at the audience and smirks: "What's your style?"
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