Director: Yuen Woo Ping
Co-director: Cheung Sing Yim
Cast: Wu Jing, Christy Chung Lai Tai, Yu Hai, Mark Cheng Ho Nam, Billy Chow Bei Lei, Sibelle Hu Hui Zhong, Darren Shahlavi, Ji Chun Hua, Jin De-Mao
Running Time: 96 min.
By Paul Bramhall
Most discussions that see Tai Chi Boxer mentioned tend to involve the wire-fu craze that dominated the Hong Kong martial arts genre in the first half of the 90’s, and it was only upon giving it a first time watch recently that it dawned on me it wasn’t a part of this era at all. While 1996 may not seem that distant from the era that most of the movies it gets compared against were made, it’s worth keeping in mind that back then Hong Kong audience’s tastes could change very quickly. To give some comparison, if we look at other popular kung fu stars during the same year, Jet Li was dabbling with sci-fi infused kung fu in Black Mask, Jackie Chan was fighting underwater on Australia’s Gold Coast in First Strike, and Donnie Yen, well, Donnie Yen was in Iron Monkey 2. The point is, the traditional kung fu movie whether it be infused with wires or not was no longer in fashion, which makes Tai Chi Boxer somewhat of an anomaly for when it was made.
Even more audacious is that it was an attempt to launch a new kung fu star in the form of Wu Jing, a member of the same Beijing Wushu Team that Jet Li was once a part of. It’s easy to tell how much the kung fu movie had fallen out of favour with audiences by the fact that, after headlining Tai Chi Boxer, Jing wouldn’t appear in a movie again for another 5 years, and even then it was just a supporting role in 2001’s The Legend of Zu. He kept himself busy through TV work in-between, but it would take Lau Kar-Leung’s (and Shaw Brothers) 2003 comeback Drunken Monkey for him to headline a big screen outing again. Of course today Jing is one of China’s biggest stars Continue reading
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