Dragon Tiger Gate

Year:2006
Director:Wilson Yip Wai-Shun
Cast:Donnie Yen Ji-Dan, Nicholas Tse Ting-Fung, Shawn Yue, Dong Jie, Li Xiao-Ran, Yuen Wah, Chen Kuan-Tai, Sheren Teng Shui-Man, Tommy Yuen Man-On, Sam Chan Yu-Sum, Tony Wong Luk-Wong, Louis Koo Tin-Lok , Ella Koon Yun-Na , Isabella Leong
Description:
If
there is one Hong Kong movie people are looking to
this year, it's probably this one: Dragon Tiger
Gate. Based on the long-running comic book from
creator Tony Wong Luk-Wong, Dragon Tiger Gate
has elements that propel it beyond your average local
production into something designed to induce Pavlovian
responses from action-starved international audiences.
Dragon Tiger Gate has it all: copious martial
arts, hot young idols, righteous posturing, noble
comic book concepts, and above all, Donnie Yen. At
its best, Dragon Tiger Gate is an energetic
action fix, and Yen is the man who makes it happen.
But at its worst, Dragon Tiger Gate is uninteresting
and embarrassing - and Yen gets plenty of blame.
He's not the only one at fault, but given his omnipresent
status as co-producer, action director and star, Yen
is the one who gets called out first. Expectations
after SPL are sky high, and anything less would
disappoint. But that's just what Dragon Tiger Gate
does.
Donnie Yen is Dragon,
a twentysomething year-old martial arts stud who
used to belong to Dragon Tiger Gate, the most righteous
of the local martial arts organizations. Dragon left
the Gate years ago with his mother , leaving behind younger brother Tiger . Years later, the two brothers cross paths at
a floating restaurant, where Tiger senses an opportunity
to utilize his high-kicking martial arts skills to
defend a hapless family from some bullying thugs.
Tiger proceeds to whip major ass, annoying the goons
of crimelord Ma Kwun .
But Dragon shows up, fists flying and locks of hair
blowing in the manufactured wind. The two tussle briefly
before Ma Kwun lets Tiger go. The lesson: even crimelords
don't want brothers to fight.
However, the two soon
cross paths again. Tiger's friends pick up the "Lousha
Plaque" from the scene of the brawl, and Ma Kwun
wants it back. The Plaque is a heavy gold badge representing
face, or some sort of Jiang Hu concept better understood
by people versed in Dragon Tiger Gate's comic
book lore. Dragon comes after Tiger and his friends
in a Japanese restaurant brawl , but proceeds to take
out his own men when some of Ma Kwun's more dastardly
minions show up bearing swords. The fight attracts
the attention of Turbo Shek , who uses nunchakus and enters the fray
because he doesn't like it when people disturb his
dinner. Cue plenty of injured people and nifty slow-motion
martial arts excess, punctuated by close-up glamour
shots of Donnie Yen's mug as the wind rustles his
silky head of hair. Much of the wind is presumably
caused by the resulting air displacement of Dragon's
punches, but we all know how it's being caused: some
guy with a nozzle blowing air into Donnie Yen's face.
Ladies and gentlemen: movie magic.
But hey, it all entertains - even with an abnormally high level of photogenic
fakery. Unlike the gritty bodyslams of SPL,
Dragon Tiger Gate goes for a mixture of choreographed
roughhousing and obviously prettified bedlam. The
artifice of Dragon Tiger Gate can plainly be
seen in every aspect of its production, from casting
, to the CG-enhanced
cityscapes, to the incredibly pretty way the martial
arts are presented. Action director Yen gets the most
out of the film's non martial artists , and director Wilson Yip stages many
of the sequences with effective, if not too showy
camerawork. But Yip's camera is upstaged heavily by
Yen's action, which uses lots of movement to little
more effect than pretty posing. Dragon spends a lot
of time flailing his arms and barely connecting, the
effect being that everything looks more cool than
it probably really is. The fighting is a step below
SPL's bone-crunching action as it lacks a consistent
sense of power, but this is a comic book adaptation,
so pretty panels are practically a necessity. And
at least the power-to-posing ratio is greater than
in The Storm Riders.
However, Storm Riders
had a storyline that actually seemed to matter, while
Dragon Tiger Gate just has obligatory story
points. The film's first scene is a cutesy first meeting
between Tiger and Ma Kwun's daughter Ma Xiaoling , but luckily the film hits overdrive
quickly with the floating restaurant brawl and subsequent
Japanese restaurant melee. After that, Dragon Tiger
Gate stalls heavily, relying on too many shots
of characters staring soulfully into the sky contemplating
their pasts - which almost always get illustrated
by a somber flashback detailing why people are so
depressed in the present. The flashbacks do explain
matters, but the exposition is mostly verbal and the
emotion largely canned. It's as if someone opened
up a cliché dictionary and cut and paste whole
sections into the script. Logically, this shouldn't
be a huge complaint because the Dragon Tiger Gate
comic books laid the groundwork, and they're only
following the material, right? But nothing about the
storyline feels organic. Backstory gets filled in
with routine efficiency, and the overarching plotline - involving Shibumi, evil leader of the Lousha Gate - never feels that involving. After a while, it seems
the main point of Dragon Tiger Gate is simply
having the audience wait for the fight sequences.
Wilson Yip's best works
have had a keen wit and understanding of character
beneath their genre trappings, but that quality is
lost in Dragon Tiger Gate. For one thing, the
characters are more types than anything else, and
those who possess anything resembling wit are quickly
shoved into the background. Shawn Yue's Turbo Shek
should have been a more fun character; he's a wandering
martial artist who wants to impress Dragon Tiger Gate
master Wong Jianglong, played by Yuen Wah in the film's
only other fun performance. The two have a couple
of fun scenes where they spar, and Turbo resolves
to train harder, but their story disappears in favor
of Dragon and Tiger's estrangement, plus a tragic
love story between Dragon and a Lousha Gate member
named, uh, Lousha . Their romance gets
mucho screentime, but it's more interminable than
involving. The other romance, between Ma Xiaoling
and Tiger, is only marginally more interesting because
the actors playing them seem to be slightly more compatible.
Tse and Dong make a photogenic pair, but their cutesy
interludes are upstaged by product placements for
Nokia mobile phones. Both Tiger and Xiaoling own Nokias,
as does Turbo Shek and probably everyone else in the
world of Dragon Tiger Gate. Yay, commercialism!
Knocking a movie for
its obvious product placement is probably a tad petty,
but this is a symptom of what's wrong with Dragon
Tiger Gate. Nitpicking on the film is easy because
as a whole, it doesn't truly involve or affect like
any good movie should. The film has solid production
design, effective comic book themes, and even some
scenes of genuine emotion .
But in the end, the defining memory of Dragon Tiger
Gate is not how exciting the action sequences
were, or how interesting the story was. No, the defining
impression left by Dragon Tiger Gate is how
blazingly cool Donnie Yen is supposed to look, and
how hard the filmmakers try to get the audience to
buy in. Aside from his extreme poses, flowing hairdo,
and flashy martial arts, Yen also gets to brood like
a badass, cry like a smoldering romantic hero, and
hug his brother with uncomfortably exaggerated passion.
Even the film's final showdown is all geared towards
Yen. Dragon shows up to take down Shibumi without
the help of either Turbo or Tiger, and his exaggerated
preening hits cinema overdrive during the finale.
Perhaps a better title for the film should have been
just Dragon, or maybe the Greatest Looking
Martial Artist Ever and his Brother.
Gripes aside, Dragon Tiger
Gate does have your action fix, and non-fans of
the comic could write off the film's canned story
and emotions as some sort of slavish referencing of
the original comic. Still, as an actual 95-minute
film, Dragon Tiger Gate only entertains part
of the time - and a bunch of that time can easily
be called entertainment of the unintentional variety.
That last gripe once again falls upon Donnie Yen,
who has had his brushes with onscreen hubris before
. The man likes to
look good, and even in SPL's gritty trappings,
Yen struts across the screen like the Hong Kong Cinema
version of U2's Bono. But to be fair, Yen is probably
the only action star left in Hong Kong who understands
that people out there actually like movies with plenty
of kicks, punches, and moments of bonecrunching impact.
We should just be glad that he's still trying to give
us what other filmmakers won't anymore - and if he
wants to look good while doing
it, that's his prerogative, right? Dragon Tiger
Gate is a mixed bag, but "mixed bag"
means that there's some good stuff in there. Pick
that stuff out, and leave the rest. That's what I
did.