Iron Monkey 2
Review
Format: Dubbed DVD
Stars: Donnie Yen, Billy Chow Bei Li, Wu Ma, Yuen Man Ching, Chang Jian Li

Donnie Yen is back as Iron Monkey in modern day, helping some people out, again.

Yea that's all I got out of the story. There were times when I was really REALLY getting confused. There are a lot of characters who I don't remember the names of, but there's a guy named Ching or something, and there's Jade Tiger, played by Wu Ma. Ching and Iron Monkey do most of the dirty work against the bad guys, and there is LOTS of it here.

Of course, it wouldn't really be Iron Monkey without wires, which it has, but not to the extent of the first one, which Yuen Wo Ping used to such extremes that I hated the fights. This one, however, has wires between the fighting (for the most part). There is plenty of real hand to hand combat without the use of wires, and it's pretty good. I'll go through the fights because I thought they were pretty entertaining overall.

The first fight scene is the most, um, cluttered. It starts off with an opera troop all stacked up and it falls down, trying to get Jade Tiger in the audience. Some hacking and slashing goes on, and then Donnie, dressed in opera dress with makeup (which is an easy excuse for a double, he does use one later on), fights against Jade Tiger with a pole, and it's not so great except for in the beginning where they use their hands only, but then it goes into wire fu chaos for a while with 6 guys surrounding Wu Ma holding him with ropes while Donnie jumps all over the place. Really all that happens here is some guys go hog wild kicking some opera troops all over the place and some weapons here and there, nothing great. A few westerners come in with guns and ruin whatever good there is in the scene, which isn't much. Too many cuts and the camera is attached to a scared cat. Donnie flies away at the end.



Ching gets in some trouble at a bar and some guys attack him, so he fights back using a staff, hits the guys and they use their awesome wire power to fly out the window in an instant. Another scene with too many cuts and a Blair Witch camera, and the guy who plays Ching doesn't really do much except whack some goons. By this point I was pessimistic about the whole movie.



The next scene is in a logging area (with lots of logs around), and Ching and Iron Monkey go at it. Here's where it finally got good (after a half hour or so), with both Donnie and the other guy doing lots of fast hand movements both close up and from distances. Sure, a little wirework is at hand, but it either has to do with kicking and then landing and waiting, or they justify it by having the guys holding onto ropes. Donnie Yen looks really slick here, too, with a snazzy suit and the other guy just not making the grade (though he is good, he just doesn't look as good as our friend Donnie). First off, Ching doesn't have the charisma of Donnie. Think about it, Donnie is a guy who saves people, while Ching is, some guy, who saved some people once (they had the scene in the movie, but when Ching grabbed a child and was about to run away to the shore from a sinking boat, they just cut the scene. What happened?!). Plus, Ching doesn't seem to have a distinct style, while Donnie looks like a martial arts Elvis almost, with hand movements that make you scream with joy! Seriously, he has those hands where he points a few fingers around and the body language says "You're weak, so I'll play with you." The two of them end up on some logs being held by a crane, and the scene heats up with them throwing punches faster and Donnie is kicking out some logs as they go. At one point, as he's kicking out the log Ching's standing on, Ching runs toward Donnie along the log that's falling, which is cool until he jumps onto the platform and one foot slips, and due to wirework he just puts the other foot on there. Lame, oh well. Still it's cool, and Donnie's presence is really awesome.



Ching, in an alley, sees a woman being kidnapped and has to protect her. Here's where you get to see him look good because he's alone and gets to do his thing (whoever he is. I'll find out later). Good looking punches, kicks, and he looks like he could kick ass. Then a guy with a black carrot growing out of his head jumps in and does a wire assisted sideways bike kick repeatedly, and Ching grabs both of his legs and out of no where the guy kicks him anyways. Maybe it's because the widescreen was CROPPED BY TAI SENG IN THIS CRAP DVD RELEASE that there was something going on on the right that I couldn't see, but still, it's interesting. I screamed out "The Hero with the Secret Leg Strikes!" Anyways, nothing special happens, and Ching nails this three legged hero (not that he really has 3 legs, but it's funny) in the knee, breaking it, but he still runs around. Duh, anyways, not much happens between the two of them, so on with the next scene.



Ok, an intermission. There is either a MAJOR messup in this movie or I'm just being dumb, but in a bar there are 2 guys walking around, one with a white coat with a tail and another with a regular black coat, who seem to BOTH be one of the main characters (a wimp, I didn't care about him). More evidence is in the fact that both of them are doing the same job. Why oh why did they change his clothes? And it's instant, one cut he's wearing white, next cut he's in black. People just don't change clothes for no reason.

Donnie goes to visit Jade Tiger (I'll just call him Wu Ma now), gets busted, and whacks a bunch of guys doing throws, punches, and a few kicks, knocks down 3 guys and they all do stunts. He gets a rope dart out and uses that to yadda yadda, nothing happens that's any good, the carrot head guy does a wire kick in the air over and over, and the camera goes from behind him and there's obviously a fake leg doing all the kicking because it's pointed almost vertically, 3 feet away from him. What the? Then the dumb westerner comes in with his gun AGAIN and tries to shoot Donnie, messing up each time. He dies. Donnie gets a double to throw the rope dart again, for some reason. Wu Ma comes in with a wired bike kick really high up repeatedly, and then....

They commence in a REALLY good hand to hand duel, with a small section ending with Donnie doing a wrist hit against Wu's chest in slow motion, cool! Here, you get to see Wu's style, with lots of pointy hits with his fingers and it's almost as though he's fencing. He even has the style for it. But it ends after a moment when Donnie tries to escape from another dumb westerner shooting at him.



The next scene comes out of no where, really. Ching is sitting in a pew at church and says, "I must avenge father". He has a reason to say this because his father was killed by a westerner, but immediately afterword he's in a run down barn fighting against a guy with a gun! Why didn't they show 1 minute of story to let the viewer know what the hell was happening? In this scene, he beats the hell out of the whitie, who is wearing an ugly wig and has a huge pad on his chest. He gets impaled by a big thing (I know just as much as you do about what this 'thing' is), and when he moves around so does the thing. Lame, oh well. Oh, and at the end, Ching really looks ugly.

Ching gets in a fight with carrot head and this other guy who throws a twirling bird cage with knives on the edge, suspended by a wire (obviously). A short scene, but carrot head looks good for once, but Iron Monkey comes in and kicks the two bad guys and the scene ends. Good thing, too, because I think that these two were in too many fights already.

Billy Chow FINALLY comes into the picture and beats up 4 guys in a drive way and looks good doing it. I don't know what it is about him but he's one of those actors that excites me when I see him get on screen.



The last fight is really long. It starts with Ching and the weak guy taking on a few guys in a room (the weak guy uses a shovel, dumb). Oddly enough, Ching is wearing the same hat that Donnie wore in Heroes Among Heroes as Beggar So. Maybe it's a popular hat, I dunno, nevermind. Weak guy kills birdcage man, and oh no, carrot head comes back again but hits his head on a step and dies. Chow comes in and gets to be the dominant, brick wall of a bad guy he really is and does some interesting moves I've never seen like 2 quick stomps on the ground to smash Ching's foot. The choreography here is like Fist of Legend except I think that Chow actually looks a little better here. Fast hand and footwork on his part and on Ching's part. Ching seems to use some kind of long fist or something where he keeps his arms totally straight for a while. Chow kicks like a mad man, destroying scaffolding and wooden ladders as he goes along. Ching ends up fighting both Wu and Chow, and the two of them completely rip apart another scaffolding. They end up on a stage, but something weird happens here. Chow is on Ching's left, Wu on the right, and they take turns hitting, and I think this was because they couldn't get the choreography straight for having a 2 on 1. That's weak, I don't like that. But it clears up pretty quickly (it happens for one cut). Ching gets beaten up and Donnie comes in through the window. Donnie and Chow fight, with some cool punches and blocking combinations from both of them, and then they fly up to a balcony, where they do a little kicking while it switches to Ching against Wu, which is a nice piece of choreography. The camera moves from the hands to the legs as the action changes focus. Donnie against Chow again, more good choreography, and then Donnie does the impossible (literally) by digging his foot into the planks below and making the ground curl up like a wave over Chow, nails him with a cornerpiece, and kicks him 30 feet back and Chow causes the ceiling below him to totally collapse. Pretty cool, but Chow is fine and takes down a huge ladder, with it coming the entire balcony and Donnie flies across the room, WEE!! Donnie flies again and kicks Chow through a window, killing him. Wu and Ching have a small weapons fight (sticks), and Wu knocks out some windows in a cross pattern. I thought he was gonna play tic tac toe with Ching for a minute like they did in Top Secret. Then it goes downhill, Wu has a sword and does a bunch of wire jumping and the like, meeting his death in a burning net. What's funny here is that they just had a dummy burn while they held it up on a wire. No burning person stands for more than 30 seconds when they've been FULLY BURNT.



So the ending died with Billy Chow, but the 4 of them put on great performances up until that point. Yea Donnie used a double a few times, but it's ok. The action was good at times, and at other times it was really bland and reminded me of bad martial arts movies, and also what REALLY hurt things was the obscene use of rainbow colors EVERYWHERE. I mean, windows with green and red panes, pink carpet, blue and green lights with purple walls and black curtains and yellow and orange ropes. That doesn't look good. Iron Monkey 1 had a better atmosphere, but luckily the martial arts here weren't compromised and, like I said, what's good is REALLY GOOD.

What I didn't mention is that there is some undercranking, but as I didn't mention it above, it really didn't bother me. Just pay attention to what they're doing and it really stops bothering you, unless the wirework is involved at the same time or the undercranking is like -23 fps which puts Chow in hyperdrive. What there needs to be is a DVD/MPG player that slows the video down as much as you want at VERY small intervals. That would make us able to really pay attention to what's going on more easily.

And one last note, don't get the Tai Seng dubbed CROPPED DVD, get a good Video CD, subtitled, widescreen, or the DVD if you want. Hell this DVD was so bad that I couldn't even slide the sliderbar in PowerDVD. Damn, that's bad. So I had to scan by using 8x speed. I MIGHT AS WELL USE MY VCR, TAI SENG!! And the dubbing is terrible, except for Donnie and a few others, but overall it's terrible. Also, this DVD is the same exact format as Eat My Dust!, which I titled as the worst HK movie I have ever seen. I'd rather watch porno with drunk homeless guys than Eat My Dust!! ! So if you've seen that, you know what to expect from this. And the dubbing is Tai Seng, so it's also Crystal Hunt quality, which isn't good either. Sad, so get a different version and you'll probably like it more than I did.

6/10 - For a movie with a mixed up plot and limited GOOD action, I think that a 6 is generous enough. A better plot, less church (there are 3 TOTALLY unnecessary church scenes), no dubbing, widescreen, no wires, no undercranking (it does hurt it a little bit actually, Chow and Donnie really didn't need it), no unnecessary characters (carrot head, birdcage boy), and MORE GOOD ACTION, because there IS good action in this, would prompt me to give it a high rating.

UPDATE 10/9 - Rating System Change

4/5 - The martial arts are quality and somewhat numerous. So, an upgrade.

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