Earthbound reality is left far behind.Īnd Li is simply incredible. The wire-assisted fight scenes – choreographed by Yuen Wo-ping, inevitably – are ingeniously staged. Director Tsui Hark, schooled in both the US and Hong Kong, fills the screen with movement and energy. Its British and American baddies are cartoonishly demonised, and the plot is often convoluted to the point of impenetrability, admittedly, but what this film chiefly provides is dazzling, colourful, kinetic, epic, pre-CGI spectacle.
Transposed to 1990s Hong Kong, with the handover from British to Chinese sovereignty on the horizon, this story of a Chinese rebel fighting oppressive colonialist powers had extra resonance. Jackie Chan played him in Drunken Master, and a long-running Wong Fei-hung film series during the 1950s and 60s gave roles to the fathers of Bruce Lee and Yuen Wo-ping, among many others. Like Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood, he’d been portrayed many times before. Its subject was already well known to local audiences: Wong Fei-hung was a real person: a turn-of-the-century martial arts master and healer who’s become something of a folk hero. The film that kick-started Hong Kong cinema’s kung-fu renaissance and launched Jet Li towards a future of substandard western action movies. No Book Cover Usage Mandatory Credit: Photo by Courtesy Everett Collection/REX (2067892a) ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA, (aka WONG FEI HUNG), from left: Jet LI as WONG Fei-hung, Rosamund KWAN, 1991 Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/REX 10. A former Ninja himself, Osaki tries to escape his violent past but soon discovers he has become the pawn of a ruthless drug trafficker.No Merchandising. When a ruthless band of Ninja assassins slaughters the family of Cho Osaki (Kosugi) in his homeland of Japan, he flees to America in the hope of building a new life. Martial arts legend Sho Kosugi (Prey For Death) steps into the fray wielding swords and shuriken - displaying super-human abilities of strength, speed and lethal Ninja know-how in the 1980s action classic Return of the Ninja. With his henchmen no match for the imposing Cole, Venarius hires the best assassin money can buy - Ninja Hasegawa (martial arts super star Sho Kosugi) enters the fray with a lethal agenda.
Coming to the aid of a war buddy in the Philippines, Cole is dragged into a land dispute with a scheming oil baron. Angolan Bush War veteran Cole (Franco Nero, Django) is a westerner living in Japan who has been inducted into the secret fighting rituals of Ninjitsu - the darkest and deadliest of all martial arts.
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