Besides the aforementioned actors, Angelababy shows up as Orchid, a courtesan who’s Wong Fei-Hung’s confidante, and Wong Cho-Lam adds comic relief as Fei-Hung’s new friend Big Teeth. Rise of the Legend is a solid idea and the cast is well-chosen. As the other three sons – North Evil (Feng Jiayi), Black Crow (Byron Mann) and Old Snake (Brian Siswojo) – look on jealously, Ah Fei performs his triad duties while making surreptitious contact with the righteous Orphan Gang, led by childhood friend Fiery (Jing Boran) and tomboy Chun (Wang Luodan). Known as “Ah Fei”, he rises up the ranks of the Black Tiger gang, quickly becoming the “Fourth Son” to leader Master Lui (Sammo Hung). Besides fan service, Rise of the Legend offers us the story of Wong Fei-Hung undercover in the Guangzhou triads. The audience gets a taste of the Peng torso in a few loving camera pans across his rock-hard abs, the camera seemingly reversing direction more than once because it wants to fixate on that six-pack. Jump Ashin! showed that Peng can handle action, and he hasn’t lost much of his buffed physique from Unbeatable either. It’s debatable if we get that fun but what we do get is Eddie Peng as Wong Fei-Hung, an inspired casting choice given Peng’s solid physicality. We’ve moved on from that era of filmmaking and the current trend is for Chinese movies that are more austere and less bombastic – but hey, those old movies were fun, weren’t they? It would be great if this new take on Wong Fei-Hung was fun too. The iconic theme is given reinterpretation by Shigeru Umebayashi (Wong Kar-Wai movies and, uh, Nightfall), resulting in a regal and respectful version that misses the bold and righteous feel of the arrangements from Tsui Hark’s classic Once Upon a Time in China movies. This is a new take on Wong Fei-Hung that diverges substantially from previous fictional representations, though the filmmakers do carry forward the famous theme song widely associated with Wong Fei-Hung. Absent as the subject of a theatrical film since 1997’s Once Upon a Time in China and America, Wong Fei-Hung gets rebooted in director Roy Chow’s Rise of the Legend, a Batman Begins-esque look at Fei-Hung before he became the famed folk hero of Canton. It was inevitable that Wong Fei-Hung would return to the big screen – the biggest surprise is that it took this long. The action is decent, but the story and characters come up short. Rise of the Legend is a disappointing attempt to bring Cantonese folk hero Wong Fei-Hung back to the big screen with a hot young cast. Ivy Ho Wan-Ming, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Liu Erdong, Bill KongĮddie Peng Yu-Yan, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Wang Luodan, Jing Boran, Wong Cho-Lam, Angelababy, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Zhang Jin, Jack Feng Jiayi, Bryon Mann, Brian Siswojo, Qin Junjie, Gao Tai-Yu, Mike Leeder
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