“Contour” Poster
Director: Eric Jacobus
Cast: Eric Jacobus, Dennis Ruel, Ed Kahana, Andy Leung, Tyler Wang, Stephen Reedy, Donovan McKendrick, Vlad Rimburg, Tracy Butcher, Steven Yu
Running Time: 100 min.
By Z Ravas
Contour is a 2006 independent martial arts comedy set in San Francisco, created by writer/director/producer/editor Eric Jacobus and his cohort of fellow martial artists and stunt performers who cheekily dub themselves The Stunt People. Prior to this recent rewatch, I had seen Contour once back when it was new-ish on DVD; I believe it was a purchase from the beloved HKFlix, a website you may remember if you have gray hairs like me, where the film earned rave reviews for its punishingly fast, Hong Kong-inspired martial arts sequences. I know I liked the movie well enough at the time but, to be honest, Contour didn’t stay with me the way some other cult martial arts movies (like Steven Wang’s Drive) have over the years.
I’ve noticed, though, that Contour still gets reverentially name-dropped on the action-obsessed side of Twitter every so often, its fight choreography spoken about with something like bated breath, so I figured it was due time to pull this DVD off the shelf and experience Contour again. I very quickly realized that the Action Twitter denizens are correct, and this effort from Eric Jacobus and the rest of the Stunt People features arguably some of the best fight sequences of the last 25 years. The movie’s roughly 100-minute runtime is jam-packed with fight after fight featuring the kinds of high kicks and painful-looking falls that leave you reaching for the rewind button just so you can wince all over again. But I also realized why Contour failed to become an eminently rewatchable favorite after I first saw it—and that’s because of the rest of the movie when the characters aren’t throwing punches.
Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Contour is a martial arts comedy and there are certainly moments here that made me laugh. That said, the movie has a specific brand of humor that often fails to land, like a running gag about a guy with a stereotypical Asian accent who sells martial arts courses that combine hand-to-hand combat with weaponized bowls of pho. Or a Christian missionary who turns out to be a closeted lesbian. Or a bunch of scenes where the gag is simply ‘this is meant to be a female character but it’s obviously just a guy in drag.’ It’s definitely humor of the Your Mileage May Vary school, but I suspect another problem is that our lead hero, played by Jacobus, readily labels himself as anti-social, so we’re also attached at the hip to a protagonist who isn’t particularly likable for the movie’s duration.
Fortunately, it’s easy enough to tolerate some dry or now dated comedy when a movie boasts action sequences this damn good. Contour was clearly a labor of love for everyone involved, that much is apparent from the opening fight scene, and even though it was shot on consumer grade digital video cameras circa the mid-2000’s, the group poured their time and effort into crafting intricate martial arts sequences that would stand up to the benchmark of their influences, namely the classic Hong Kong action films of the 1980’s like Righting Wrongs and Wheels on Meals. Even today, you sense there are very few performers who could rival the speed and ferocity of Eric Jacobus and Dennis Ruel’s onscreen bouts here. There’s an added sense of melancholy watching it now with the knowledge that Dennis Ruel sadly passed away just last year, but “Contour” remains an enduring testament to the fact that the man could kick like lightning.
In fact, watching Contour is enough to make you wish that the film had proven to be the Stunt People’s big break. Dennis Ruel would go on to direct 2015’s crowdfunded Unlucky Stars, a terrific tribute to Hong Kong’s glory days in its own right, one that features supporting roles for guys who have since become big names in the action direction sphere, like Sam Hargrave (the Extraction series) and J.J. Perry (Netflix’s Daybreak). For his part, Eric Jacobus has found great success in recent years as a motion capture artist in the video game industry—he performs as Kratos in Sony’s immensely popular God of War series. All the same, Contour exists as a special artifact of its time and place, when a bunch of talented and hard-working stunt folks came together to make a rowdy, lo-fi homage to their martial arts heroes. Twenty years later, it remains worth a revisit or a first time watch as an example of what raw passion and talent to spare can accomplish in the indie action sphere.
Z Ravas’s Rating: 7.5/10
