Written by Chris Chow
Directed by Ronny Yu
“One cannot choose how one’s life begins. It takes courage to finish the final step.”
This movie is Jet Li’s final film as an action hero. At 48, he’s made the wise decision of giving up such roles before age prevents him from being unable to perform artistic feats of violence. The action scenes in Fearless certainly push Li to his physical limits…yet throughout the movie, I had the sense that I had seen it all before…
Jet Li’s Fearless is an film with a vast inferiority complex…and that complex has a name: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Fearless spend it’s entire running time offering complex ballets of destruction, inter-mingled with sweeping vistas of green & misty mountains, lush, green valleys, and sparkling rivers and lakes. Every shot screams “look at me…I’m just like Crouching Tiger!”
But it’s a hollow imitation.
Fearless is full of cliched dialogue, cliched anxiety, cliched fights, and cliched emotions. The entire plot could have been written on the back of a napkin by a hack Disney screenwriter, offering feel-good hero worship, American-style…the only difference being that it’s performed in Mandarin Chinese. The worst offence comes when Li’s character finds himself in a village-in-a-valley that seems to have been created as a back up to the Hobbiton set from The Lord of the Rings! There, he finds solace in planting rice, and being tutored by the local blind girl named (gag!) Snow…though I’m grateful that it didn’t go as far as the purifying sexual encounter. Instead, we seem to have endless scenes of preparing meals, baiting Grandma, and standing in the breeze.
Yup…it’s certainly isn’t Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Fearless simply has no proper sense of emotion or human understanding. The characters are paper thin, the foreigners are stock characters, pulled from a box marked “generic, imperialistic white people”, the time scale is completely off kilter, and the grand climax is one of those bog-standard, “tragic-over-coming-the-odds/evil-master’s-wishes” finales. All we need is Jean-Claude Van Damm and the tableau is complete.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an epic love story/fairy tale subversion of an action movie, lifted to sublime heights by a visionary director, a satisfying screenplay, and actors working at the top of their game. Jet Li’s Fearless is simply a by-the-numbers imitation, without any of the depth and any of the soul of Ang Lee’s magnum opus.
As you might hear on The Simpsons, this film certainly “reeks of effort”…but I’d give it a miss, if I were you.
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