Dragon

Peter Chan's Dragon sees Martial Arts star Donnie Yen, as seemingly mild mannered village paper worker Liu Jinxi, paired opposite Takeshi Kaneshiro's wounded but dogged detective Xu Baijiu. One of the interesting things about Dragon, which is set in rural China circa 1917, is that the plot does not place Kaneshiro's Xu as Yen's physical challenger. Instead, early twentieth century detective Kaneshiro is out to arrest Liu rather than duel him, believing him to be the former rampaging criminal legend Tang Long hiding in disguise.

Xu is drawn to the small village when Liu defeats two bandits who try to rob the general store. The seemingly clueless and clumsy Liu claims that he won through sheer luck and accident. Investigating the crime scene with his keen powers of perception and projection, detective Xu quickly suspects that Liu in fact used superior marital arts techniques, including the ability to hit key pressure points in the body so as to cause almost instant death. Furthermore- this can only mean that Liu must indeed be a former member of a bloodthirsty group called the 72 Demons which continues under the leadership of “the Master” (Jimmy Wang) who is Tang Long's father. Determined to force Liu to drop the veil of affability, Kaneshiro probes Liu and his wife Ayu (Tang Wei) with more and more force over the days, watching Liu's movements closely to try to catch him off guard. Whether or not Xu is right and Liu is in fact an imposter gets put to the test when the 72 Demons come calling, looking for their long lost member.

This strange mix of detective story and martial arts redemption myth tale is at its strongest when Yen and Kaneshiro are sparring with each other and Xu is sniffing around. There are some neat uses of CGI and audio as we see Xu recreate the battle the Liu fought in the general store in his own mind, contradicting Liu's tale of a chance victory. The CGI assisted fatality moves (involving nerve and vein rupturing) that Xu imagines Liu executing are suitably grisly. Kaneshiro himself as Xu is a interesting foil for Yen, a character carrying emotional and physical baggage akin to that of a noir detective. It would be interesting to see a film entirely about his character, with his keen mind offset by his tortured family relationships and his dense knowledge of physiology driven by his deteriorating medical condition and constant pain.

But it is really Yen's show and martial arts action is therefore on the cards. The fight scenes are certainly technically impressive (though not anything you can't see in Yen's other films), and most are one-on-one battles taking place in interestingly tight domestic confines, refreshingly free of too much exaggerated CGI trickery and the digital hordes of recent Chinese epics But the film is less satisfying when it completes its transformation into a more typical martial arts epic with awkward melodramatic beats and a conclusion once Liu's disguise inevitably falls, and the Kaneshiro-Yen dynamic gets sidelined somewhat. Dragon ends up being an interesting genre mash up that doesn't quite seem to come off.