Kitty Zhang Yuqi – Windows on Worlds

Adapted from Jin Yong’s wuxia classic The Smiling Proud Warrior, Invincible Swordsman (笑傲江湖,
xiào ào jiānghú) has a hard battle to fight in covering the same ground as 1992’s Swordsman II which featured an iconic performance from Brigitte Lin as the androgynous Invincible Asia. Produced by streaming network IQYI and Tencent, the film has a more epic feel than the studio’s similarly pitched wuxia and was also released in cinemas but is undoubtedly a much more conventional affair let down by an over-reliance on CGI.

To recap, Ren Woxing (Terence Yin Chi-Wai) led the demonic Sun and Moon Sect in despotic fashion slaughtering many of his own followers. Consequently, they flocked behind Invincible East (Zhang Yuqi ) to free them who eventually defeated Woxing and has imprisoned him in the basement of their lair. Meanwhile, drunken but earnest swordsman of the Mount Hua sect Linghu Chong (Tim Huang) has befriended Woxing’s daughter Ren Yinging (Xuan Lu) through their shared love of music and is kicked out of the clan for treason. Nevertheless, he’s taken on as a disciple by the charismatic Feng Qingyang (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) who continues teaching him martial arts before he’s called back to the world of Jianghu by Yingying who warns him his friends are in danger after teaming up to defeat Invincible East who has now become even more despotic than Woxing in drinking the blood of their victims to stay young.

Even so, breaking Woxing out of containment so he can take out Invincible East seems like a bold plan given there’s no guarantee he’ll actually do that and even less he won’t just go back to his old ways afterwards. Linghu Chong only participates out of loyalty to his men and as a favour to Yingying and is therefore constantly insisting that none of this is anything to do with him because he’s leaving the martial arts world. It’s a fault with the source material, but it’s quite frustrating that all these women are hopelessly in love with the actually quite bland Linghu Chong who has a nasty habit of turning up every time a woman is about to fight someone and heroically standing in front of her. Ironically, that’s how he meets “Invincible East” without realising, or at least the nameless final substitute of Invincible East who has become the public face of the legendary warrior.

Christened “Little Fish,” by a besotted Linghu Chong who believes her to be a damsel in distress, she is the only female substitute of Invincible East who has undergone self-castration in order to achieve a higher level of martial arts and in the film’s conception thereby feminised. Unlike the ’92 version, however, Little Fish is concretely female and bar a brief flirtation with some of her maids more preoccupied with her lack of individual identity in having no name of her own. Consequently, her love of Linghu Chong becomes an opposing identity though she feels herself forced to take on the persona of Invincible East. Linghu Chong too is fascinated by her mystery which causes him to act in a caddish way towards Yingying who is otherwise positioned as his rightful love interest even if their romance is frustrated by the relationships of their respective clans.

What they’re really fighting is Invinsible East’s corruption of Jianghu which it wants to rule in its entirety. The corruption has already worked its way into the Mount Hua sect as ambitious couturiers vie for power and throw their lot in with the Sun and Moon sect in the hope of advancement. Luo does his best to conjure a sense of the majestic in the elaborate action set pieces, but the over-reliance on wire work and CGI particularly for the swords leaves them feeling inconsequential while there’s barely any actual martial arts content as the fights revolve around the martial arts stances rather than combat. Frequent homages to the ’92 film including the use of its iconic song also serve to highlight the disparity in scope and vision though even if Zhang Yuqi appears to be channelling Brigitte Lin there is genuine poignancy in her tragic love for Linghu Chong which is also the longing for freedom and another identity that is forever denied her. With his belief in Jianghu well and truly destroyed, Linghu Chong finds himself a lonely wanderer and refugee from a martial arts world largely devoid of hope or honour and adrift with seemingly no destination in sight.

Invincible Swordsman is released on Digital 19th August courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Stephen Chow unexpectedly became a mini phenomenon with that rarest of beasts – a foreign language comedy that proved a mainstream crossover hit, in the form of the double punch that was Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer. However, his once ascendant star has been in retrograde ever since when it comes to screens outside of Asia. The surprise worldwide theatrical release of this latest film, The Mermaid (美人鱼, Mei Ren Yu), might be about to change all that.

Loosely inspired by The Little Mermaid, Chow paints a world of consumerism in overdrive as heartless capitalists fall over themselves to destroy the beauty of the natural world to buy even more flashy status symbols even though they only make them even more miserable. After opening with some newsreel footage of mass deforestation and a bloody dolphin massacre, Chow shows us the natural world exploited in a different way as a group of visitors visit an “exotic animal show” which includes such wonders as a live tiger (actually a pet dog with stripes painted on its fur), a “Batman” (with fried chicken for ears), and, crucially a “Mermaid” (a fried fish with a doll’s head on the top).

We’re then introduced to rich playboy businessman Liu Xuan (Deng Chao) who lives life large in a giant western style estate surrounded by gold digging dollybirds. He’s bought some “surprisingly well priced land” to use in a reclamation project, only the problem is it’s technically a nature reserve. His underlings have come up with a scheme to frighten away the wildlife with sonar devices so they can destroy the area of outstanding natural beauty in peace. However, they didn’t know about the colony of Merpeople hiding out there who have a serious problem with Liu and have dispatched one of their number, Shan (Jelly Lin), to assassinate him!

Predictably, the assassination plot does not all go to plan with often hilarious results. Like Chow’s other movies, the main spine of the narrative is a romantic comedy in which a foolish and arrogant man is made to realise his own weaknesses through finally noticing a woman he previously had no interest in. This time Shan turns up looking like a crazy lady with her bizarre makeup and fake mermaid outfit which gets her instantly thrown out of Liu’s place though she does succeed in giving him her phone number. Usually, Liu isn’t the type to call back but he gets goaded into it by mistake and then his henchman actually brings Shan to his office where she fails at assassinating him first with poison and then with sea urchins. By this time the course is set as the pair bond during their macabre meet-cute with Liu becoming attracted to Shan’s otherworldliness and she to the goodness that might be buried inside him.

Liu, it seems, experienced extreme poverty in his childhood and so now cares only about making money. Or says he does, his depressing solo karaoke dances to a hit pop song with the chorus “no one understands my loneliness” might tell a different story. Being super rich is actually kind of boring and everyone he meets only cares about his money so meeting Shan (who is predominantly interested in killing him) proves refreshing. Nevertheless, money also becomes an anchor dragging you down, even if Liu starts to come over to the Merpeople’s point of view (particularly after testing out those sonar devices on his own ears) his associates aren’t likely to agree.

It all goes a bit dark towards the end – wildlife massacres and kidnappings for “scientific research” which seems to include things like vivisection and live experimentation not to mention the intentional eradication of the entire living environment of these hitherto hidden creatures all the while preaching about scientific progress and a desire for understanding. Chow is many things but subtle has never been one of them so he lays his environmental message on with a trowel but the rest of the movie is so big anyway that he gets away with it (and in style).

Light and bright and colourful, The Mermaid is another characteristically madcap effort from Chow who packs in all the absurdist humour one could wish for plus a decent dose of sight gags and good old fashioned slapstick. It has to be said that the quality of the CGI (of which there is an awful lot in the film) is, on the whole, woeful, though somehow this just ends up adding to its charms as another facet of its self-effacing wackiness. A hilarious return to form from Chow who has been away for far too long, The Mermaid looks set to continue its enormous box office success by becoming one of the director’s most fondly remembered efforts.

The Mermaid is currently in UK cinemas but the distributors have gone down the Bollywood route of chasing the diaspora audience only (as RogerEbert.com discovered during the US release) and not engaging with the regular film press in any way, shape, or form. Therefore there has been almost no coverage of the cinema screenings in the non-Chinese media. Here’s a list of the surprisingly high number of UK cinemas screening the film courtesy of my friends at Eastern Kicks so check it out because it very likely could be playing at a cinema near you!

Tag: Kitty Zhang Yuqi

Invincible Swordsman (笑傲江湖, Luo Yiwei, 2025)

The Mermaid (美人鱼, Stephen Chow, 2016)