Review by Jonah Ewell

An All-Time Classic! If you haven't seen this movie, beat yourself with a rubber hose until you turn black and blue. Then go get it and watch it several times! This is Jet Li's remake of Bruce Lee's equally classic Fist of Fury, or The Chinese Connection as it was titled for U.S. release. The story is the same in either version: The star pupil of Jing Wu Men martial arts school returns to Shanghai after a long absence to find his beloved master dead, beaten and killed in a duel with a local Japanese martial arts master. Jet Li/Bruce Lee refuses to believe his master could have been beaten in a fair fight, and investigates, with incredible kung fu action results!!

The main difference between the two movies (besides the awful sound and editing in the U.S. version of Bruce Lee's movie) is tone. Bruce's movie quivers with righteous anger towards the Japanese. At the time the movie is set, the 1930's, China finds itself carved up between many foreign powers. The national government of the Kuomintang, such as it is, is incredibly corrupt and almost powerless. The British have Hong Kong, the Germans have the Shandong peninsula (which eventually results in your favorite and mine, Tsingtao beer), the Portugese have Macau, the French, the U.S., and many other countries have divvied China up like so much pie. In the "British concession" in Shanghai, for example, Chinese laws did not apply. It was considered a part of Britain, equivalent to today's embassies, except that instead of a single building, large parts of the city were "concessions." Chinese people weren't allowed onto these parts, unless they were very rich.

This was a hard lot for the proud Chinese to swallow, but perhaps the worst was the Japanese. In the past, China thought of Japan, if it thought of it at all, as almost a vassal state, certainly inferior to China, and expected annual tribute. Now the Japanese had taken over Manchuria, as well as large bits of major cities. They harass the Chinese, beat them, and even erect signs at parks that say "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed." In a particularly emotional scene from The Chinese Connection, Bruce smashes a sign like this with a flying kick.

Jet Li's Fist of Legend begins, of course, with an incredible, jump-out-of-your-seat-and-start-yelling fight scene at a Japanese university, where Li is studying medicine. Some nationalist punks burst in and try to throw him out of the school. Li tries to avoid them at first, but when they smack around his Japanese girlfriend (!), he defends her using almost all Qin Na techniques, breaking arms, dislocating shoulders and jaws, and shattering kneecaps in gut-wrenching fashion. That's when the news comes: his master has been killed, and he leaves on the next boat to Shanghai.

Li's movie shows both Chinese and Japanese victims of the war, ordinary people who are swept up in the chaos and have nothing to do with their country's politics. Li's movie adds an extra dimension of humaneness to Bruce Lee's original story of pure vengeance.