Wolf Warrior was written and directed by Wu Jing, a wuxia actor who got his start in Hong Kong but made his name in China. He plays the lead character, a maverick sniper in the PLA who is reassigned to a special division outside of direct combat situations after killing a drug dealer without waiting for instruction. The title kind of gives it away - I thought this movie was kind of dumn, but it turned out to be a pretty important launching pad.
Read more about it after the jump...
Pre-corona, Hollywood studios had come to rely on releasing their movies in China to bolster their box office returns taking advantage of a huge, relatively affluent and cosmopolitan population of moviegoers. That source of income has become a lot less reliable of late however. One of the reasons for this is that some of the movies such as several of the Disney corporations output have been blocked by the government. But another is that more films are being produced domestically and provide robust competition.
While working with Communist party officials tailoring their features to secure an Eastern release and filming near not at all suspicious work camps in the northwest of the country, their practices were being observed and copied. Chinese producers apparently mapped out the formuls and have started making blockbusters of their own.
The apotheosis of this is 2017's Wolf Warrior 2 which broke numerous earnings records both domestically and worldwide and became associated with an antagonistic form of diplomacy employed by CCP state propagandists. I haven't seen it yet and can only hope it's a big improvement but my guess is it's every bit as jingoistic as its predecessor if not more so.
There was a joke on How I Met Your Mother about how the 80's didn't get to Canada until the 90's. In China's defense, they were more or less closed off to the rest of the world for a few decades but the plot and pacing of this movie is reminiscent of that era's over-the-top, formulaic aesthetic.
But one of the classic beats of that type of storytelling is missing - after being packed off to the Wolf Warriors ppresumably to teach him some discipline and teamwork our errant hero Leng Feng, played by Wu Jing himself, is never brought low, never truly has a moment of regret or reflection.
The principal villain of the piece is the brother of the drug lord Leng Feng takes out at the start of the movie but the antagonists, all his agents in the field are foreigners motivated by nothing but money. They are led by Tom Cat, a former US Navy Seal who only non-English speakers could belive is an American. In their hunt for their prey, the foreign mercenaries cross the border into China and violate all kinds of boundaries of international law and plausibility as they happily go about murdering stray members of Feng's Wolf Warrior unit.
The action and preactical effects are pretty good but they jarringly veer between hyper realistic modern warfare and aerial wuxia acrobatics. There's also a romantic subplot between Feng and the token female officer which is poorly developed (like most of the characters) and post a crude joke or two to open with, does not sizzle perhaps a victim of conservative oversight. The pacing and editing is sharp and cold, in short I found it shallow. Like a lot of products Made in China it's a knock-off version of the real thing.
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