The Man with the Iron Fists

 

Guess what happens when you do a Hollywood update on schlocky kung fu movies?  Surprise!  You get a schlocky kung fu movie that feels strangely awkward, since it's trying to hide its Hollywood budget behind a lot of stilted dialogue and silly, badly choreographed action.  The Man with the Iron Fists is the brain child of rapper RZA, who has a passion for martial arts flicks in real life, and stars, directed, co-wrote and provided the music score for the film.  He even hired his pals, producer Quentin Tarantino and co-writer Eli Roth, to help put the thing together.  It's good to have powerful friends in the business when you want to make a movie.  It's even better to know how to act, write dialogue, and tell a coherent narrative.

RZA portrays a freed slave in the late 1800s who fled from his Plantation, and wound up in a small Chinese village.  It's here that he makes his living as a blacksmith, assembling weapons for the different warring clans that are currently fighting one another for control of the local region.  He has no name (he's simply referred to as "The Blacksmith" in the credits), as well as no personality and a dreadful dull monotone voice.  So, naturally, he gets to be our Narrator.  As the Blacksmith works in his shop, the warring clans all kill each other in elaborate and bloody ways.  So much CG blood sprays and flies at the camera, you have to wonder if this film wasn't intended to be in 3D at one time.  Of the people fighting one another, the only ones we need concern ourselves with are the heroic Zen Yi (Rick Yune), the evil Silver Lion (Byron Mann), and a guy who looks like he walked out of a pro wrestling audition, who can change his whole body to brass whenever he wants in a fight (Dave Bautista).

There's some gold being shipped to the Emperor that the evil Silver Lion wants to steal.  Zen Yi is trying to stop the evil plan, because the guy killed his father.  How does the Blacksmith figure in all this?  He's in love with a the local "whore with a heart of gold" (Jamie Chung), who works for the scheming Madame Blossom (Lucy Liu).  Most of the action seems to revolve around Madame Blossom's place.  Eventually, the Blacksmith winds up helping Zen Yi when the guy becomes too wounded to fight.  When Silver Lion finds out about this, he has his goons chop off the Blacksmith's hands.  But then, his life is saved by a violent British man named Jack Knife.  He's played by Russell Crowe, in a performance that I imagine he'll be doing his best to forget before too long.  Crowe looks pudgy, bored, and like he lost a bet right before he stepped in front of the cameras here.  Nonetheless, he has a score to settle with someone in Silver Lion's gang, so he goes about building a pair of iron fists so the Blacksmith can extract bloody revenge along with the other heroes.

If The Man with the Iron Fists sounds like it's been cobbled together from a dozen or so martial arts flicks, that's because it is.  I get that RZA is trying to mimic some of his favorite old films of the genre, but because he has no experience with making movies, his attempts at imitation are often sloppy.  The fight and action sequences are filmed so close, we don't get to see everything that's happening.  But perhaps the real problem is the fact that he put himself in his own movie.  His performance is far too modern to belong in the period film that he is making.  The movie should have been told from the point of view of Zen Yi, who often comes across as the real hero of the film.  The Blacksmith character kind of stands in the background until the third act.  I guess he's supposed to appeal to modern audiences, but given what a non-entity he becomes, thanks to RZA's lifeless performance, the movie would have been better off without.

What's worse, I think, is that there is just no joy to the production.  Oh, there are some lines in there that made me laugh (both intentionally and unintentionally), but the movie is so sour and drab, when it should be energetic and colorful.  At times, it seems to want to be a parody as well as a tribute to these old martial arts films, but it never goes far enough.  It kind of stops halfway, in an awkward state where we're not sure if we're supposed to be laughing at the movie because it's intentionally corny, or if we're supposed to be laughing at it because it's so frequently awkward and bizarre.  Maybe something got lost in the final film.  I have heard that the movie was originally four hours long, and got paired down to roughly 95 minutes.  Whatever was in those missing three and a half hours or so probably wouldn't have helped anyway.

 

If RZA wishes to step in the director's chair again, I hope he focuses more on actually making a movie, rather than just mimicking old ones.  With people like Tarantino supporting him, he definitely has some talent to lean on.  The Man with the Iron Fists wants to be a loving tribute, but thanks to the amateur direction and screenplay, it ends up being a pale imitation instead.

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