Donnie Yen

(On TV, September 2020) Imagine my surprise, upon sitting down to watch Iceman: The Time Traveler, to get a big-budget, high-imagination first few minutes rushing through an entire movie’s worth of plot in less than five minutes: All right, now we’re off to the races, I thought. A quick search confirmed that this was a sequel, and that the prologue was a trailer-sized summary of the first film. Now that the origin story was out of the way, I was hoping that the film could move to more interesting material than its premise of feuding Ming-era warriors being frozen and sent to modern times. Unfortunately, I had already seen the best of what the film had to offer: The Time Traveler lives up to its title by taking us from the modern era back a few hundred years, then to the 1920s, then all over the place in a plot that disintegrates the longer it goes on. Save for a somewhat spectacular final sequence set aboard a train that keeps going through time, the action and spectacle in the film are lacking, with superstar Donnie Yen turning in the strict minimum. There are one or two beats about the inevitability of a closed time loop (recast in romantic tragedy) but otherwise the result just isn’t all that interesting, and the incoherency of the film goes far beyond lacking cultural references or having to rely on translated subtitles. Digging deeper in the film’s production and reception in China reveals that Iceman: The Time Traveler remains one of the biggest flops of recent years—there’s a contentious production history between Yen and the film’s producers, as well as scathing reviews from Chinese-language sources. No wonder it’s even less interesting to western audiences: it’s just a bad film from the start.

(Netflix Streaming, September 2015) I’m definitely not as good an audience for martial arts films as I was a decade ago, because even if I can recognize Yip Man as a good example of the form, accomplished in its fights yet with something more on its mind than a simple succession of combat demonstrations, I can’t muster much enthusiasm for it.  Set largely against the backdrop of the Japanese occupation of China before and during WW2, Yip Man is, more than anything else, a showcase for the affable and quiet power of Donnie Yen, who plays the title role as a charming but utterly competent martial arts instructor.  The fights grow in ferocity, from playful sparring to bone-crunching mortal combat.  The cinematography is too-often similar, though, and some of the narrative points aren’t made with any subtlety at all.  A comparison with The Grandmaster, which focused on the same character’s story, is almost instructive: While The Grandmaster led nowhere, it did seem to do so in far more lavish style, and as a result may linger in memory a bit longer than Yip Man even if its narrative flaws were deeper.  I actually liked Yip Man; I just expected that I’d like it even more than I actually did.