Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen

Review

Andrew Lau’s Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen features Donnie Yen as the mythical hero, played in the past by both Bruce Lee and Jet Li. Here, Chen Zhen stands up for his Chinese countrymen, first when they’re used as cannon fodder by British and American troops in World War I, then when they’re terrorized by the Imperial Japanese Empire in Shanghai. The prologue is stupendous, with Yen zigzagging and scampering around battlefield debris to take out a nest of German snipers: Take that, Quentin Tarantino! But when the film shifts to Shanghai and the club Casablanca, there’s too much lustrous-hued loitering and too few martial�-arts set pieces. This isn’t another disposable B movie, though. Lau made Infernal Affairs, superior in every way to its Americanization, The Departed, as well as sequels that deepened that picture’s scope, and the melodrama in Fist is grounded in national traumas�muddled loyalties and a legacy of oppression�that play out in various forms to this day. — David Edelstein