Circus Kid
3/26/2001
Review
Format: VCD
Stars: Yuen Biao, Donnie Yen, Kenneth Lo, Nina Li

A circus troop gets implicated with some opium smuggling and join with the local authority to stop it.

Much like the situation I was in with Don't Give a Damn, I've owned this VCD for so long and finally get to review it. Biao plays a circus performer, and Donnie is an officer. It's a nice movie I think, the settings are very cool. It almost feels like Drunken Master 2. And it's a different kind of movie overall at the same time.

The film starts out showing some circus performers in a tent. Biao is one of them and enters with some good acrobatics and (if it's him) he does a really cool move where he holds onto two straps hanging down, one on each arm, and rolls himself up towards the ceiling. The others do the same. After that there's a stunt where a guy is on a swing and gets swung way up into the air and is caught by the trapeze artists. We see some other stuff like a girl with awesome balance (she holds 5 candelabras on her body all over as she moves around), a few kids who fit into tiny tubes, and again Biao doing a thing where he climbs a pole while keeping a straight body, arms out, and spinning around it. Incredible, and I hear it was he who did it too.



There's a small fight with a girl (Nina Li?) inside a store which is small but I like Yuen Biao's punches, even though he only does like 6.



Biao breaks into a jail house thinking his uncle is in there but gets stopped by Donnie Yen. It's a decent fight going up some stairs. Biao does some good kicking and so does Donnie, some good handwork in the beginning too, and there's a lot of wirework BS but it's used only to take Biao upward. Donnie has none on him of course, he seems to glide wherever he goes. The camerawork is excellent, though there are a lot of cuts. Whenever more than 3 hits go, then it's another angle. But like I said the angles are well done, some of them through the balcony columns.



There's a fight on a boat where everyone gets involved (except Ken Lo). Biao fights against the female opponent who is quite good with hand to hand work (you'd be surprised), has some brief exchanges with her, and does some good acrobatics (if it's even him, I have my doubts) here and there. Donnie beats up people left and right and sadly doesn't get anything too interesting, which is almost sacreligious because his presence in this movie almost demands that he have some kind of intense fighting, but there's nothing really. Just standard kicking and punching at bad guys. In fact there's nothing spectacular about this fight anyways. Some good camerawork again, but bad editing, too many cuts.



The finale is a mix between massacre and decency. To start with, forget about anyone except Donnie, Biao, and Ken Lo. Nobody else can fight in this scene. Donnie fights some totally incompetant British guy who uses horrible moves and is painfully slow. Donnie of course is stylish to the max and does whatever he can to make the fight look impressive and puts out some great looking chain kicks, which are usually interrupted by terrible editing once more. The British guy is doubled sometimes so poorly that they shot from above and you can see this HUGE mess of a wig that they put on a guy. I mean come on, at least TRY. It even looked like Donnie was doubled at times, which may have been due to footage that they wanted to add later and just got someone else to do it.



Biao and Ken Lo have some good exchanges when it's just regular kickboxing. Ken Lo is fast, so is Biao. Their small scene next to a table is the highlight of the fight. The editing again is super choppy, but it's well filmed nonetheless. There's one part where in one cut Ken breaks through a table, and then immediately after he's doing punches with Biao a good 10 feet away from that same table. That's aweful. Ken does chain kicks but they have him do the same exact 3 kicks 4 times in a row from different angles and expect viewers to just take it as good fighting. Biao pulls out some elastic cords with steel balls on the ends from his sleeves and uses those to beat Ken Lo in a terribly wired finish to their brawl. Ken obviously has the upper hand but loses because he accidentally falls in a fire.



Something I can tell about this movie is that the good scenes were filmed in a way where you could see where the people were in relation to the environment. The fighting may have only been soso, but the viewer had an idea of what was happening and where. The fight in the jail is the best one in the movie because you know EXACTLY where Biao and Donnie are, they're on stairs going upward. Easy. But in the finale, you might know where Donnie is fighting, but where the HELL are Biao and Ken Lo? There's never one shot of the scenery to give us a hint. So this leads to some confusion and detracts from the value of the whole thing. Compare this to the last fight of Drunken Master 2. In that one, Jackie and Ken Lo start on a wooden rise and go down, and then go all the way down a corridor, and it's easy to see that. In this, they are sparratic and appear in weird places. One scene you see the table, and then it's gone with some totally different background, all within 2 seconds. A small lesson in angle choosing.

So I was mildly impressed with this. The scenery was good except not shot properly in the finale, and the fighting was good whenever it was nice and thick but it wasn't always that way. There's just not a whole lot of good action in this, and the best you'll get out of it I think is the prison fight and the short bursts of kickboxing between Biao and Ken Lo at the end, plus Donnie looks cool. That's about it. I would give this a 3 had the finale had more good fighting with Ken, but I don't wanna give it a 2 because there were enough moments for me to enjoy.

2.5/5

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