CIFF 2012: Dragon

As you can tell from the title, this is a Chinese martial arts movie. It also has veins of a police procedural as well as a Western.

It is the late 1910s in a Chinese village.  The action starts when two hoodlums extort money from a merchant. A papermaker, Jinxi (Donnie Yen), at first cowers and hides as the hoodlums attack the defenseless merchant, but when Jinxi can stand it no longer, he reveals himself. Through a lot of apparent good luck, he manages to kill the two thugs.

A young policeman Baiju (Takeshi Kaneshiro) has been sent out to investigate this crime. Jinxi is seen as an accidental hero but due to Baiju's personal knowledge of Chinese Qi knowledge (accupuncture and accupressure and things like that), he is able to view the evidence and surmise that the deaths of the thugs were not strokes of good luck, but due to Jinxi's expert knowledge of where to hit someone to cause them to have anuerisms and the like. This knowledge of course seems too advanced for a humble papermaker, and Baiju, through his investigation, finds out Jinxi is actually the son of a noted mobhead; it seems Jinxi was unable to live the cruel life his father wanted and left to be a simple man.

Since the time he left home, Jinxi had met and married a woman with two children whose husband has abandoned her, and by taking her family name, was able to live under the radar for a while. But due to Baiju's desire to follow the letter of the law, Jinxi's identity has been exposed, bringing the wrath of his father onto his new family.

This martial arts picture is a cut above the typical type of this genre, as it actually has a good story. Jinxi's story is quite typical though, taking on a very Western film role as a bad man who wants to redeem himself and live a life of peace. Baiju's inner character has a harder time convincing himself that sometimes you have to ignore the law in the interests of humanity, as he cannot seem to allow Jinxi to live his new life, and realizes this only when it is too late.

There are only several big action scenes but they are well-acted and choreographed, and the action sequences are not overused. The cinematography of the country setting makes the humble scenery quite glamorous and is well done.