1979, Taiwan. Starring Angela Mao Ying, Don Wong Tao, Man Kong Lung, Doris Lung, So Chan Ping, Kwong Ming, Tong Lik, Leung Kar Yan, Cheung Fong Ha, Show Lo Fai, Yuen Sum, Man Cheung San, Ho Kong, Jo Pu Lam, Mao Tak San, New Mei Mei, Ha Hau Chin. Directed by New Kwong Lam. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

When all is said and done, the plot of just about any movie can usually be summed up in one sentence. In a good movie, reducing the plot to a single-sentence synopsis, while possible, results in the potential viewer missing out on what actually makes the movie great. For example, you can strip Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest down to "A man is mistaken for another man and soon finds himself fighting for his life against mysterious agents." While accurate, the sentence hardly begins to encompass the various nuances and twists that make North by Northwest one of the best action-thrillers out there.

Although most plots can be similarly boiled down to their base element, few are the movies that actually outline the entire plot with the first two lines of dialogue. Fewer still are the movies where reducing the plot to a single sentence doesn't result in you missing out on at least something. But such is the case with Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion, a movie that lays out it's entire story when, in the first scene, an old kungfu master tells his young female student to go find the master's brother. That's it. What's truly astounding, however, is how a movie with such a simple plot can boast such convoluted storytelling. By the end of this whole martial arts mess, your head will be spinning with a whole lot of nothing, leaving you frustrated and more than just a bit disappointed.

A big part of what makes Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion so disappointing, besides the fact that it's more or less a study in never-ending tedium, is that it stars Angela Mao Ying, one of the all-time greats and one of the top five ass-kickingest female movie stars of all time (she sits atop the pile alongside Pam Grier, Claudia Jennings, Zeenat Aman, and Etsuko Shiomi). Along with women like Polly Shang Kuan, Mao was one of the first women to make a name for herself as a kungfu star after women like Cheng Pei-pei and Lily Li blazed the path in early swordsman films. Working frequently with Sammo Hung as a stunt and fight choreographer, Mao clawed her way tot eh top during the early 1970s with her combination of fists, feet, swords, and grace. She was none too hard on the eyes, either.

Angela Mao got her start in martial arts when she began training as a member of a Peking Opera troupe in 1958 after having already spent time training in ballet. That's a lot to do by the time your eight. By the time I was eight, I think I could ride a bike and melt an army man with a magnifying glass, but none of that was going to help me become a kungfu star. Also in the troupe was a young actor named James Tien, who should be a recognizable name and face to any old school kungfu film fan. Tien starred in hundreds of martial arts films, including Bruce Lee's Big Boss and Fist of Fury.

Mao got her first role in 1967, when Huang Feng cast her in his upcoming film Angry River. Huang Feng is also the guy who would give Sammo Hung and Carter Wong their big breaks, and the same magic worked with Angela. After a few movies, most notably The Fate of Lee Kahn directed by Taiwan's legendary King Hu, Mao caught the eye of some guy named Bruce Lee, who got her a short but memorable part as his character's sister in Enter the Dragon. Although she doesn't last long in that movie, seeing a woman on screen kicking some ass kungfu style was more than enough to get people interested in her.

She made a series of films alongside Carter Wong, a kungfu workhorse who has never gotten he credit he deserves (even after puffing himself up all big in Big Trouble in Little China, the best of which was When Taekwando Strikes, which also starred Korean martial arts master Jhoon Rhee. While working on the film Hapkido, she also developed a partnership with Sammo Hung, who would go on to choreograph several more of Mao's best films. With movies like Enter the Dragon, When Taekwando Strikes, the British-Hong Kong co-production Stoner (with George Lazenby!), and the brutally violent Broken Oath under her black belt, Angela Mao carved a place for herself in the kungfu star hall of fame.

But it's safe to bet that Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion didn't do much for building her reputation. It's not a good film, especially compared to some her other work. It has all the right elements: cool and esoteric kungfu styles, old masters, intrigue and treachery, Angela Mao and Don Wong Dao. Nothing comes together though, and the end result is a tiresome train wreck of a film that stretches ten minutes of story into a feature length film.

Mao stars as a young swordswoman who, as we now know, has to go find her master's brother, who has mysteriously disappeared. What follows is a full film's worth of Angela wandering around aimlessly in a village looking for this guy, while various kungfu factions attack her for no real reason. Don Wong Dao shows up from time to time to fight, and later assist Mao in her bland quest. Characters and factions are introduced with absolutely no development whatsoever. A character whose identity is obscured throughout the whole film is eventually revealed to be exactly who you think he is. People who act nice but seem like they might be hiding evil sides are indeed hiding evil sides. This movie is full of shady characters and mysteries, yet not a single one of them is in the least bit interesting.

As someone who considers himself not without a small degree of expertise regarding old kungfu films, I'm used to convoluted plots and films that throw so many characters at you that you need a flow chart and an Oracle database to keep track of them. Traditional Chinese storytelling has always been fond of tossing characters at you left and right, often with little explanation of where they came from and little explanation of where they go. Heck, the classic martial arts epic Water Margin has what? Well over a hundred main characters? The fact that people come and go with suddenness mimics real life well, but it also makes for some confusing storytelling. You get used to it after a while though, and with a little work and concentration, keeping most of the players straight and sorting out the threads of plot is not that difficult.

A story has to at least make you want to sort everything out, though. The Shaw Brothers classic Brave Archer has tons of characters and a story resembling a bowl of spaghetti, but the movie is so good that it's worth the effort to get it all straight. Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion instills in its sundry characters not a single interesting trait, making the job of sorting them out unrewarding, and ultimately darn near impossible since most of the characters exhibit no characteristic that sets them apart from any other character. It's just an assortment of guys in wigs stroking their fake goatees as Angela Mao walks from building to building. Although character development has made good kungfu films great (witness just about any Liu Chia-liang film), it's never been a necessity for making a good kungfu film good. You can get by without it so long as your movie delivers something interesting. Even static, one-dimensional characters can be interesting. No one watches Kungfu Zombie to see the dynamic evolution of Billy Chong's character. But Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion really pushes things too far. Not only are the characters bland to the point of insulting the adjective "bland," but the film doesn't give you anything else to make up for it.

You know when someone is trying to tell you a very simple joke or a story, and they keep pausing, having to retell one part, stammering, messing up, and generally aggravating you to the point where you want to throttle them and just scream, "Spit it out, man!" - that's what this movie is like. What should be a minute-long anecdote becomes twenty minutes of mind-numbing boredom that almost makes you break down and cry. Likewise, what should be a short film with a simple plot becomes stretched past the breaking point. An endless procession of dull scenes involve Angela Mao walking into someone's compound and asking them if they know where her teacher's brother is. They all say no, and as she walks away, the camera zooms in on whoever she was talking to, who will then stroke his goatee in a devious manner. It's about as subtle as a moustache-twirling villain in a black coat and top hat tying maidens to the train tracks.

And why do we care anyway? All we know is that some guy is missing. We don't know anything about him. Why would someone kidnap him? Why should we even care? When Angela Mao finally finds the old coot, the revelations about who is evil and why he's been kidnapped are hardly worth the pain the rest of the film has caused. The reasons for the kidnapping are events that don't even have anything else to do with the entire film! Geez, by this point I would have taken a revelation like, "Evil Ma killed your father!" even if no character named Evil Ma had been in the film up to that point, and then Evil Ma shows up out of nowhere for the final duel. But we don't even get anything like that. The rescue of the old man is sort of like getting all worked up about one of those firecracker champagne bottles only to pull the string and, instead of a pop and shower of confetti, the cardboard bottom just tears off and a wad of paper falls to the ground.

From time to time, a fight scene interrupts Mao's random questioning of beard-stroking guys. Often times, the fight breaks out because Angela just waltzes into a courtyard unannounced and starts swinging her sword at people until someone asks her to explain, then everything is okay. Maybe if she would announce her intentions before barging in and sticking blades in people, these fights wouldn't break out. Normally, you would want a fight to break out in a kungfu film. After all, that's what makes them kungfu films. But when you see the fights here, you'll realize with no small amount of anger that they are about as interesting and energetic as the scenes in which Angela Mao walks down the street to her next destination.

And just when you think things can't drag any more, the movie takes a break for a five-minute long fan dance sequence that boasts are the energy of an old man pouring molasses on a cold Dakota morning. The intricacies of the dance seem to hit their zenith when a woman at one end of a row walks slowly to the other end of the row and the evil master, obscured behind a curtain for no good reason since it's not like we give a rat's ass who he is, gets to laugh and stroke his goatee. This entire sequence drags so bad that time will actually reverse while you are watching it. Normally, the ability to reverse time is a good thing, but unfortunately it will only reverse time to a point earlier in the film, and you'll have to watch it all over again.

Mao is not a bad martial artist, but she needs a good choreographer. With one in place, the girl can shine like the sun, but without one, you'll wonder why she became such a star. Let's just say there was no Sammo Hung working on this film. The kungfu fights are just painful to watch, and not in a good way. People seem to move at half speed. Everything consists of "flail arms, tumble forward" type of choreography -- the sort of stuff that makes a Jimmy Wang Yu fight look complex. When things threaten to get halfway interesting, such as when Mao faces off with a female fighter and her exploding lotus-wielding minions, the sluggish, clumsy nature of the fights more than negates to esoteric novelty of a bunch of guys who, for some reason, have their screams dubbed by women (they don't scream like women - women are actually doing the screaming) as they hurl exploding plastic lotus blossoms at our heroine. Whoa re these people? Well, they're allied with one of the beard-strokers, but if anyone bothered to write out exactly what the alliances are in this film, they forgot to actually shoot those scenes.

The movie flirts with being almost watchable in a scene where Mao must negotiate a house of traps type fortress that is full of hidden swordsmen, balls of fire, flying saw blades, and stone lion statues that spit acid. Even with all that cool stuff, Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion still manages to be dull. Even Treasure of the Four Crowns showed more energy. The final fight scene is just as awful as everything else that came before it. The combatants move as if they are in slow motion. What the hell? Is everyone doing tai chi in this movie?

There's really nothing worth watching here. Angela Mao fans, of which I am a big one, will only mourn her participation in such a dreadfully uninspired and uninteresting movie. Likewise, people who are wondering what Angela Mao is all about certainly aren't going to be convinced of her greatness by Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion. If you are a student of taking one simple plot and stretching it out seventy minutes past its breaking point while, at the same time, trying to recount even the simplest fact in the most convoluted fashion imaginable, then maybe this movie is worth your while. For everyone else, this thing is just a failure on every level you can think of, and maybe even a few new ones that didn't occur to you until you had to do something like sit through that fan dance sequence. If anyone can drum even the slightest interest in anything that happens in this film, they are certainly more determined and forgiving than I am. I hate to write bad reviews, or at least to write bad reviews without finding something of value amid the garbage, but this movie just leaves me speechless when I try to dream up any redeeming quality. Angela had a couple nice outfits. I'm afraid that's the best I can do.

In Enter the Dragon, Angela Mao guts herself with a jagged shard of glass rather than suffer the villainy of her attackers when they corner her in an old dockside warehouse. I felt like doing the same thing to myself in order to escape this movie.

Labels: Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1979