Skinny Tiger Fatty Dragon
April 28, 2001
Review
Format: VCD Chinese Subs Only
Stars: Sammo Hung, Karl Maka, Lau Ka Wing

Two cops, Sammo and Maka, track down the leader (Lau Ka Wing) of a rough gang who is involved in... something, I dunno my Cantonese ain't too hot.

I couldn't understand much of what was happening sometimes. But there were some obvious things like Sammo dressing up as a robber to foil other robbers, etc. For that reason, though, I didn't laugh at this as much as I did at Paper Marriage or Where's Officer Tuba. But the action in it is some of the best modern Sammo material. I consider this his best work of the 90's (and after) because of a good amount of fighting (a few scenes but they're long) and some choreography that beats even some of his work out of the 80's. In addition, Sammo's uncanny Bruce Lee imitations are all over the place. He screams whenever he throws a punch and much of his choreography is very Bruce-like, only long and modernized (no complaints here). Even Maka is able to pull some stuff off convincingly, but it's not much. However, that guy is a comedic genius, both physically and verbally, and simply has the air around him to make people laugh.

We see Sammo's first Bruce-ism in a jewelry shop where he puts a stalking over his head to get at the other thieves, trying to act as one of them. But he didn't know what was on their faces, he just knew they had something. But the thieves all have Sesame Street masks on, one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Sammo breaks into some gunfire for a minute but loses his gun, of course. The camerawork is modern Sammo stuff, but it's good. Different from Eastern Condors and yet just as accurate at showing everything. He punches, does a few throws, and a kick and that's it, small Sammo intro.



Sammo heads off to an abandoned building and fights an army of bad guys. More excellent Sammo camerawork with lots of rotating camera angles and LONG cuts. Maka gets a "meanwhile" scene in the same location fighting 2 other guys and doesn't do much interesting but still manages on his own. Sammo is super impressive and gets ahold of 2 metal bars and does escrima on everyone, sometimes 3 at a time. He puts about 15 hits into the last guy. The scene is about 2 minutes long and it's blazing fast.



Sammo finds 2 men (who look like women and actually are, but for the story's sake aren't) and realizes that they're prime suspects. Awesome camerawork here too, it takes place in an outdoor restaurant and everything that happens is captured perfectly. The men who double for the women are very good, and the women themselves are good as well and manage to take punches and kicks realistically. Sammo is impressive doing some kicking with his combos and starts getting into the Bruce thing with neat looking blocks and locks. One bone to pick though is when Sammo starts a whirlwind, a double finishes it and it doesn't look half as good as his own. Probably an editing thing but it's really abrupt and annoying. Excellent scene.



The last scene is long and varied. Sammo and Maka get into a gigantic fight with Lau Ka Wing and his 30 or so gang members. Lau Ka Wing is awesome at doing kickboxing and I wonder sometimes if the guy is more multi-talented than his 2 brothers simply because he can do both modern and classical style fighting as well as anyone. His kickboxing is great, and his weaponwork is too. Anyways, Maka throws generic punches that Ka Wing accentuates with interesting blocking. Some wirework (3 times in the beginning, I counted, single cut stuff) which is terrible but it's stopped quickly. Maybe Sammo realized that it was a bad idea. Ka Wing fights Sammo for a bit, and Maka brings down another hoarde of bad guys. Sammo tells them to attack, but Maka informs him that he made a booboo and brought enemies, so he fights THEM off. There's one part that slows down here (I'm overanalyzing), but still it keeps pace really well, and Sammo pulls out nunchaku (num-chucks as Americans call them), while Maka takes some guys with hammers and performs well for a second or two. And then MORE guys come. Sammo throws more good nunchaku work with some long cuts and good camerawork... then



From what I've read, Sammo takes a common HK fighter (white guy) and replicates a wing chun sequence from Enter the Dragon, every punch of it. Well, I honestly don't believe that because it looks exceptional, nothing looked that good in ETD. The opponent is really good, I can see why so many movies have him (he's in the beginning of Aces Go Places V). He is very fast and sharp and does everything on his own, but his scene is really short. Doesn't matter though, it's a super high point of the finale. Sammo goes on to fight Lau Ka Wing immediately afterword...



Sammo vs. Lau Ka Wing, you can't go wrong. Of course, the two are exceptional with eachother and make things look more realistic than COPS, Lau gets knocked around by Sammo at first and then grabs 2 knives. Sammo does the same. Sammo does a really nice back fall into a stomach roll and the camerawork is much different than I've ever seen, it seemed like Sammo was experimenting everywhere in this and just managed to get it right every time. Sammo and Lau go into extremely complex and LONG choreography with the knives and I was very excited to see the movie end with this kind of fight. It was so fast, amazing, they just know eachother all too well with weapons it seems. Great stuff. Sammo strangles Lau but doesn't kill him at the end.



I'm so at ends as to how I should rate this. On one shoulder, the devil is telling me to give it a 4/5 because there were only 3 good long fights, while the angel on the other shoulder says "5/5, it's so good, this is an experimental piece." Well, I don't think I can help but take the angel's side on this. Sammo tried totally new camerawork for stuff, which hasn't been used since it seems, and it was so good and the experience I got from it was unmatched, everything was so slick. The only other 90's Sammo film I enjoyed was Don't Give a Damn, which I gave a 3/5. That was an experiment too, but didn't work out as well. Some of the camerawork is similar, but HERE, there's a LOT of really cool single angles, like people going across the screen with fighting going on behind them. The 3 fights I reviewed are exceptional, all of them. I highly recommend this one, but again don't get this if you wanna know the story and you can't understand Cantonese/Mandarin/Chinese writing. You'll do a lot of guessing. Still it's funny, great action (clocked about 10 minutes of STRAIGHT action, the finale has to be over 10 minutes long but I cut it apart and took the good stuff, add to that a car scene and other parts), and overall, any Sammo or Bruce Lee fan will enjoy this.

5/5

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