Iron Monkey

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Dani G Pretends to be comedy, pretends to be drama... The only thing it is? A means to start kung fu fights anytime, with FX very vintage, to say it nicely Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/21/25 Full Review Flixster F A typical action film from the 90s. Not outstanding but passes the time. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 07/03/24 Full Review Leaburn O This is just playful king fu. Not a serious plot at all but so much creativity in the fight scenes. I'm not a huge fan of martial arts films but the short run time made this one just about palatable. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 06/13/23 Full Review Taylor L You like RRR? Want to see the martial arts version? Two martial arts masters with day jobs come to know one another as friends - one a folk hero by night, the other a wanderer who finds himself tasked with hunting the vigilante down (not knowing his new friend is his target). Nominally it's a loose adaptation of the Robin Hood mythos integrated with an origin story of Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung (who appears as a child in this film), but it's hard all these years later to not see shades of the S.S. Rajamouli film (RRR) despite the fact that this predates it by almost three decades. While Ang Lee was giving martial arts movies more of a serious flair in the '90s and '00s, Yuen Woo-ping preserves much of Hong Kong's balance between really solid action choreography and pervasive humor in Iron Monkey. It's light as a film, with antagonists that never really feel terribly threatening, but really shines with some top-notch fight design that straddles the line between impressive and mythic. And by mythic, I mean suspended by wires. Seriously, the action is impressive enough that I'd bump the score over what is otherwise a well-made but pretty unsurprising folk tale brought to the screen, Donnie Yen is in top form. Weird that this took almost eight years to go from completion to a wide US release. (3.5/5) Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/09/23 Full Review Audience Member A little bit predictable but very enjoyable movie ! Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/08/23 Full Review jordan m I enjoyed this a lot more than some other Hong Kong action movies I'd seen as I now had enough experience to forgive the overly-convenient plot devices and hyperbolized characters to enjoy the fight scenes and underlying story. I would've preferred a more uniform use of magic if they were going to use it at all but I suppose they did give it to both of the villains, and I would've preferred to have seen the original rather than the Miramax-tampered one as political subtext is what butters my biscuit and the fight scenes likely would've benefitted from the comedy that the studio excised. The fights themselves were clearly well-executed, though nearly all of them had gimmicks that took away one's suspension of disbelief if you cared too much as every main villain used supernatural tactics and the final fight on the stilts didn't seem particularly plausible. I've enjoyed other gimmicky finale fight scenes like the ladder one at the end of The Musketeer and this one was fine, just not as great as I felt it could've been. Still, I liked the movie and am glad to have seen it. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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