Wong Fei Hung is a legend in China, a ‘people’s hero’ and master martial artist whose story has been told again and again with varying degrees of success.
Jackie Chan has had a go with the immortal Drunken Master 2, and Jet Li has tried his hand at the role a couple of times, more recently Fearless.
For many this is the blueprint version of the Wong Fei Hung story and one of the better martial arts films of all time – it spawned at least 4 sequels that I know of. But I find myself on the fence here, while it does boast a couple of classic martial arts sequences and in Jet Li it has the most accomplished martial artist this side of Jackie Chan, the story does nothing for me and some of the lesser fights are clumsy and frustrating to watch.
Wong Fei Hung (Jet Li) is a loyal Chinese citizen, honest, brave and true. He is tasked with dealing with the aftermath of governmental mismanagement, namely dodgy contracts with foreigners that do the Chinese no favours and have created an environment rife with corruption at every level.
Did I mention Wong was honest, brave and true? In any case his ‘China First’ policy raises the hackles of the nasty foreign types of many nations and the opportunistic and desperate locals who would deal with them for their own benefit. While Wong takes his job very seriously unfortunately the locals are too scared and the authorities too corrupt and/or gutless to back him as he attempts to level the playing field.
Orbiting around the ‘honest, brave and true’ Wong is the beautiful Aunt Yee, the laddish Foon (Yuen Biao) and a whole host of hardworking decent folks who just want a fair shake and trust that Wong’s honesty, bravery and true-ery will help bring it to them.
Of course if no-one is willing to settle things peacefully it is inevitable that even someone honest, brave and true must eventually get ornery, violent and kick-ass… It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen a martial arts film that Wong Fei Hung must temporarily shelve his principles of peace and pacifism in order to ride into the fray on his good white slippers to dish out a good old fashioned ass-whipping.
There are apparently many versions of this film in existence. The version I watched was a good half hour too long and included lengthy sequences that I think were allegedly left in to provide humour but resulted in nothing more than space filler.
The fights too could have benefitted from selective culling. One scene in the finale consisted of a glorified game of keep-e-off with bad guys leaping and air-kicking without ever going near the intended recipient, before presenting the hero of the scene with their full chests so that they might receive kicks of pure justice. The decision to highlight this poor choreography in slo-mo is even more baffling.
Further depressing is the fact that while the climactic fight scene on ladders is indeed well done, it is less a fight than it is wire-aided gymnastics. It always bothers me when an athlete of the calibre of Jet Li isn’t deemed impressive enough without gravity defying effects that basically waste his natural athletic talents. But in essence that’s what happens here.
Once upon a time in China is fondly remembered as one of the pioneering martial arts films in an era when they were starting to be cautiously received by a Western audience. While I won’t be sacrilegious enough to say that it doesn’t warrant any merit, it is fair to say that it has not aged as well as many of its peers, and that there are in fact a great many better martial arts films made in the decades since – many by Jet Li himself.
Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. A couple of decent fights can’t cover the fact that upon a time in China is too long, confusingly plotted and features uneven fights sequences that are often poorly choreographed.
