Iron Monkey (Blu-ray)

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"Iron Monkey" opened in Hong Kong in September 1993 with a Cantonese/Mandarin soundtrack and an English dubbed version. But it didn't come to the States until Quentin Tarantino used the martial arts fight choreographer from "The Matrix" for his own "Kill Bill" sequence and realized that the talented Yuen Wo Ping had a pretty significant body of work under his presumably black belt--including this action-comedy. And so Tarantino "presented" "Iron Monkey" to American audiences in an October 2001 re-release and a spring 2002 DVD release.

This September the film was also part of a martial arts quartet brought to Blu-ray by Miramax/Disney, the others being "Hero," "The Legend of Drunken Master," and "Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman." And while Yunda Eddie Feng found all four films to be of equal merit, awarding the same score in his DVD review as he did the others, I felt that while "Iron Monkey" succeeded on the whole, I did have a few "issues" with it.

Tonally, I thought that "Iron Monkey" seemed like an intelligent action-comedy at times, but a less-accomplished (and just plain silly) dinner-theater farce part of the time (with bad acting and dialogue), and an all-out comic-book style cartoon for the rest of the film. If there had been a little more consistency, it would have easily ranked with the rest as top-notch entertainment.

That's because there are some phenomenal action scenes, including a pivotal one in which the combatants (using wires, of course) do battle atop a forest of burning poles in a courtyard, with hellfire and damnation awaiting the loser. But what's impressive about "Iron Monkey" is that it isn't just the note-leaving simian who commands our attention. Iron Monkey (Rongguang Yu), who is Dr. Yang by day, is supported by his assistant, Miss Orchid (Jean Wang), an attractive and loyal woman whose acrobatic and aerial martial arts moves are just as good. Then there's Wong Kei-ying (Donnie Yen) and his almost-as-accomplished son, Wong Fei-hong (Sze-Man Tsang)-two itinerants who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and end up fighting to stay alive and stay a "family" after the father is mistaken for the Iron Monkey. And heroes are only as good as the villain they have to go up against. In this film it's a Ming the Merciless-looking Shaolin turncoat named Hin-Hung (Yam Sai Kwoon), and a kung-fu-fighting hag that's appropriately dubbed the Witch (Fai Li).

"Iron Monkey" is a Robin Hood tale set in mid-19th century China, during a time when warlords drove peasants to cities in search of protection, but unscrupulous government officials offered more of the same, with their own brand of tyranny that made use of the Shaolin monks everyone thought would protect them instead. Enter the Iron Monkey, who, like Robin Hood robbed from the rich to give to the poor, and like Zorro was a respected aristocrat by day and a masked folk hero by night. His favorite target is the biggest oppressor of them all: Governor Cheng (James Wong), and he distributes bags of gold (looks like pyrite, actually) to all of the downtrodden.

But while the front-line actors are credible, the attempt at comic relief with local policeman Master Fox (Shun-Yee Yuen) and his bumbling soldiers feels like amateur night. Badly dubbed English voices with insanely wrong inflections and dialogue only adds to the stupidity. It feels as if the filmmakers were trying for the same sort of comedy as Sergeant Garcia and his inept lancers provided in the old "Zorro" TV series. But the comedy is played too broadly, and not terribly skillfully. As they round up people, he says, "You look like a monkey. Arrest him!" Other times, a montage that feels more sincere than comic has cheesy lines: "Thank you Iron Monkey" all the peasants say as bags of gold are dropped into their midst.

At times, the dialogue reminds you of the bad lines spoken in the old Toho nuclear monster movies from the Fifties. If you turn off the dub it inches up on the intelligence meter. Still, another problem is the translation throughout. I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, but it doesn't take a native speaker to recognize discrepancies in the script. When, for example, the Iron Monkey is joined on a rooftop by Miss Orchid, the English dubbed version has him saying, simply, "Thanks." But the subtitles offer a much more graceful (and I suspect literal) translation: "Not even this downpour can stop you." If you only watch the dub version, you get a sometimes subtly but sometimes radically different movie. "Damns" are thrown in where none exist in the subtitles, and instead of "To cure swelling, you fool," we inexplicably get, "It's for swelling, you dumbhead"--the latter, more reminiscent of Three Stooges language. It's these low-comedy moments that made the film feel like a different movie from the one that gave us more tongue-in-cheek humor in other instances and in the third act degenerated/accelerated into full-blown comic-style treatment, with characters crashing through walls and seeming unfazed.