A "new" Hong Kong action fantasy is going to fly into mainstream movie theaters Friday, thanks to the success last year of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." The trippy thing is, it was made years before Taiwan director Ang Lee's Academy Award winner.
It's called "Iron Monkey" and was directed in 1993 by Yuen Wo-Ping, the action genius behind the "flying" martial arts in "Crouching Tiger." The smart money says the spruced-up "Iron Monkey" is going to create another sensation --
subtitles and all.
Miramax, the production and distribution company, shrewdly started buying the rights to Hong Kong films years ago, starting off with some Jackie Chan movies. At the same time, the company picked up some films Yuen Wo-Ping directed with the idea of releasing them at least on home video and maybe in theaters.
"Maybe" became "definitely" after "Crouching Tiger," says Miramax executive Mark Gill in Los Angeles.
"Iron Monkey" is also going to give the widest exposure yet in America to a "new" martial-arts star who's been around for 20 years. The name is Donnie Yen,
and it's going to be one to remember. "You'll be seeing my face more and more, " he says.
It will be in the sequel to Wesley Snipes' "Blade," possibly in a TV series and, if "Iron Monkey" catches on, in additional Miramax releases of his Hong Kong films.
Anybody who thought "Crouching Tiger," however elegant, was slow is unlikely to feel that way about "Iron Monkey." In this case, Yuen Wo-Ping not only staged the action, but he also directed the movie from beginning to end.
While Yen gets top billing, the hero is something of a mystery man, a masked fighter for justice called the Iron Monkey. Yen appears, with shaved head, in the role of a physician-martial artist traveling with his son -- played by an 11-year-old girl.
Here it gets a little tricky. In these swordsman fantasies, set in legendary eras, women fight on equal status with men. Just to give it another twist, sometimes there's cross-dressing, too.
Yen's own mother was his first martial-arts instructor. He was born in Canton but got his first lessons from her at age 9 when the family was reunited in Hong Kong. They moved to Boston, where his father publishes a Chinese-language newspaper. Yen returned to China at 15 to study with the same national martial-arts team as Jet Li.
"I was kind of a rebel, and my mom sent me back to China when I was a little bit out of control."
Yen likes to refer to himself as a rebel. Another term that keeps coming up is perfectionist.
He made his first Hong Kong movie at 18 "and never stopped." He's 38. Thirty-five films and 270 hours of TV series later, he now lives in Los Angeles. That's where the action is.
Yen is a protege of Yuen Wo-Ping's who has struck out on his own behind the camera. He is both a martial-arts star and action director, sometimes in the same project. He made his biggest splash with a 30-hour Chinese TV series based on Bruce Lee's "Fists of Fury."
As Yen sees it, he didn't play the same character as Bruce Lee. He played Bruce Lee. "I told the producer, we're got to recaptivate what made Bruce Lee tick. Two words: his rage."
At the same time, he says, martial arts "is an interpretation, an expression, like dance, like a gesture. It's how you do it. We are human. We have two arms, two legs, we cannot fly."
Yen knows it was the wire-work "flying" that captivated American audiences in "Crouching Tiger." Actors in harnesses are lifted on wires by highly skilled, offscreen specialists called "pullers."
"I hate wearing harnesses," Yen declares, "I hate it. I don't like wire work because I'm a true believer in martial arts. I could put you in a wire and have you flying around."