Wu Xia, which will be called Dragon when The Weinstein Company releases it in the United States, brought the Festival's weekend slate roaring to life. An antidote to the slow, overweight Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which also had its world premiere here yesterday, Peter Ho-sun Chan's martial-arts morality play is as lithe as it is forceful, and a lesson in how to make an internationally appealing action film with taste, depth and feeling.
In a village in Yunnan province in 1917, Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen) is a modest man with a loving wife, Ayu (Lust, Caution's Tang Wei), and two young boys. His peaceful world is ripped apart when two bandits burst into town and rob a local store. As the aged owner and his wife cower in a corner, Jinxi takes reluctant action and ultimately kills the two tough guys — one dying from an expert application of pressure to the vagas nerve known only to a few members of the 72 Demons clan from a neighboring province.
These deaths arouse the interest of the investigating detective, Xu Baijin (Takeshi Kaneshiro). An advanced student of the body's internal workings, Baijin becomes convinced that Jinxi is the notorious murderer Tang Dong, son of the 72 Demons' Master (Jimmy Wang Yu). But if he is Tang Dong, why is he toiling as a paper-maker in this obscure hamlet? And with what fury might the killer react when he suspects the detective knows the truth?
Wu Xia bears similarities to A History of Violence, the film that David Cronenberg made from the John Harris graphic novel and which had its world premiere in Cannes six years ago. To this template, Chan adds the CSI element of the diligent forensic investigator — except that here the man who strives to serve justice is also, if unwittingly, an agent of destruction and death.
When the Demons learn the whereabouts of its renegade prince, they descend on the town with Armageddon in mind. First Jinxi must do battle with the clan's reigning female fighter (Hong Kong action-film veteran Kara Hui), and then defend his wife and sons against the Master — his own father.
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