Audience Member
An Na Yu Wu Lin (Anna in Kung Fu Land) (Wai Man Yip, 2003)
There is something about the guy with a girlfriend falls for someone else and gets stuck in the middle plot that really nags at me. It's a dick move on the guy's part, needless to say, and for a writer (in this case The Great Magician's Ho Leung Lau) to use it as comedy fodder always strikes me not only as lazy, but as a way to set yourself up with a very unlikable hero and two leading ladies who have the capacity to devolve quickly into jealous, nagging shrews. So as soon as Ken (Vampire Effect's Ekin Cheng) gets back from Japan, where he's just recruited Anna (Three...Extremes' Miriam Yeung Chin Wah) for a martial arts tournament he's setting up in part by offering her up one of the hottest screen kisses in recent memory and we find he's got a girlfriend... ugh. And yet somehow, and despite the fact that I went into this with pretty low expectations given both its place in my sorted Netflix queue (in the bottom 20%) and its rating on IMDB as I write this (4.5), I ended up... not hating it. It's certainly not the best piece of moviemaking I've seen this month, but it was relatively charming, high up in the eye candy department, and has good enough comic timing to keep me chuckling throughout.
I've already given you the first half of the plot above: Ken heads off to recruit Anna, the daughter of the last guy to win a major martial arts tournament that fell into obscurity, so she can compete in a newly-revamped version of it backed by an energy-drink billionaire. Then we get home and find out he's got a girlfriend. So he tries to pass each girl off as his best friend's girlfriend to the other, leading to some odd, awkward scenes that still manage to be amusing. Then comes the tournament, with a subplot about an American producer who's looking for someone to star in a martial arts movie, but the second half of the movie is all about the tournament. If you've read YuYu Hakusho, you know pretty much everything you need to about the tournament, from the crazy competitors to the ridiculous finishing moves.
Given the movie's structure (manufactured drama followed by big-ass tournament), it sort of begs comparison to Warrior, released a decade later and played seriously where this one goes for laughs. While empirically there is no doubt in my mind that Warrior is a better movie by any metric you can measure, the two movies exist to satisfy two separate audiences. Warrior is a drama that also happens to be a sports movie, while Anna in Kung Fu Land is a sports movie that also happens to be a comedy. It's a subtle distinction at times, but it's important in how you approach the movie and whether you're willing to buy Anna's compete dispensing with reality by halfway through the movie. Since I already had a frame of referenceYuYu Hakusho was one of the first series manga I glommed onto when I started getting back into comics a decade agoI saw exactly where this was coming from and was more than happy to go along for the ride. Your mileage may vary (but then again, that just means you should probably go read YuYu Hakusho). ***
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
Audience Member
I watched this one last night, I got it on DVD last week in HK. Its another Miriam Yeung romantic comedy vehicle.. this time her and Ekin Cheng. The plot is pretty basic and thin, she's the daughter of a martial arts master participating in a big martial arts championship with lots of different random characters (three monk kids, two weird twin girls, Jim Kelly wannabe american guy, Wu Dang girl, etc). The best part about it was the packaging for the competition scenes, it was a lot like 'Dodgeball' where they have the TV info graphics up on the screen as they introduce the characters.
The martial arts is pretty thin too, a lot of wires and nothing incredibly ground breaking, one nice thing is that Yasuaki Kurata (the japanese guy from Fist of Legend) has a small part as her dad.
The verdict on this one is that anything that Miriam does is inherently entertaining, even if its not a well made movie with a very memorable plot, add Ekin to the mix (and Denise Ho as his scary cop gf), and there are enough entertaining scenes to keep this from being rotten.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/01/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Fanciful, G-rated versions of the fight sequences from Bloodsport are fun to watch, but a clumsy, implausible love triangle takes up most of the time and takes away the fun.
The story about an advertising man (Ekin Cheng) working on a campaign for a new little-brown-bottle energy drink. They come up with a martial arts contest as a gimmick. The Shaolin Temple agrees to attend but only if the company can get their former champion who ran away with a Japanese contestant to enter as well and settle an old score. So the guy goes to Japan and finds Sword Shek and his daughter Anna (Miriam Yeung) just as they are challenged by two Chinese students. They beat them and agree to send Anna to the contest. And then, Anna, in an inept sequence, falls in love with the ad guy and spends the rest of the film obsessing over it when she should be concentrating on winning the contest.
[list][*][url="http://www.kungfucinema.com/reviews/annainkungfuland.htm"]Review at Kung Fu Cinema[/url].
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Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/01/23
Full Review
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