Shaolin (2011)

This must be the first movie I've seen because it was excerpted in a video where an expert rates on-screen kung fu veracity. I decided it had been long enough since my last martial art viewing.

In the 1920s, Hou Jie (Andy Lau) is a warlord as brutal and treacherous as the next -- until his daughter (Shimada Runa) gets killed, his wife (Fan Bingbing) walks out on him, and he becomes a powerless fugitive with a bounty on his head. Not knowing what else to do with his life, he joins Shaolin Monastery, which he had recently desecrated, the abbot (Yu Hai) being more forgiving than most of the monks. He finds a new level of emotional peace, but his fighting days aren't over: His former deputy and "sworn brother," Cao Man (Nicholas Tse), is perhaps even worse than Hou used to be, at least with regard to refugees. And these monks are not the hands-off, super-pacifistic kind of Buddhists.

Lest you think there are only two sides in play, westerners have started intervening in China by this time. They first hope to trade machine guns for railroad space, which Hou surmises can only mean imperialist ambitions. By the climax, they're as bloodthirsty as the local warlords. Judging from the few oddly slow English lines I recall, the foreigners are supposed to be American.

So yeah, it's not strictly kung fu all around, what with handheld guns and eventually cannons. But the monks always use either bare hands or blunt weapons, usually staves. Basically, any time you see a bladed weapon, you know it's in the hands of a Chinese thug.

Are they credible combat scenes? Only to a point. There are no outright fantasy elements, but I'm pretty sure a few moves required wire-based assistance. Sometimes I thought, "He's still alive?!" In general, the fights do far more than anything else in the picture to strain credulity.

The one actor whose name you're likely to know is Jackie Chan, playing the monastery chef, who has not formally trained in kung fu but incorporates his culinary gestures to good effect. Unsurprisingly, he provides the bulk of the comic relief in a film that's otherwise remarkably serious for the genre.

BTW, Hou's daughter isn't the only prepubescent child on screen. Several young boys, who serve primarily as kitchen assistants, get in on the action. Pretty disturbing in light of the R rating for a high body count.

Shaolin is one of the better-written, probably better-acted martial art flicks I've seen. I just can't recommend it to those looking for sheer fun.