I needed something to clear my pallet of the holiday season. So I went for something different, steampunk wuxia. The movies I saw were listed as a two-parter, doing a very loose retelling of the origin of the Chen style of the martial art t’ai chi ch’uan which, at the time, I assumed would be like John Wu’s Red Cliff. Based on that, I decided to watch them back to back. They weren’t quite the two film epic I expected but were still quite enjoyable.
The first film of the two Stephen Fung’s Tai chi Zero tells the story of Yang Lu Chan aka the Freak (Jayden Yuan) born with a strange growth on his skull called the “Three Blossoms on the Crown,”. This gives him the ability to memorize any martial Arts technique he watches. When this bump or hit, he becomes an unstoppable berserker.
The downside is it’s slowly killing him. He is told the only way to save himself. he has to seek the Village of Chen where we can be taught by Master Chen (Tony Leung). When he arrives at the village, he discovers that everyone in the village is a martial arts master(even the adorable eight-year-old) and it is forbidden to teach the village’s techniques to outsiders. All of his attempts to get to reach Master Chen are thwarted by the villagers led by Master Chen’s daughter Chen Yu Niang (Angelababy)
Meanwhile, the Chinese government wanders expanding the railway and regards the village as an inconvenient impediment. They Decide to deal with it using the army and giant steam-powered automatons.
This was mostly a fun film, with tongue firmly in cheek. The fight choreography was well done what I especially liked about it was, was the captioning where Each character is introduced along with the r actor case dependent on the popularity of the actor) in large letters.
The next film of the two, Tai Chi Hero continues where Zero left off, With the British East India company who have been backing the Chinese government, wants to deal with The village of Chen once and for all.
Meanwhile, Yang Lu Chan has married Chen Yu Niang to become part of the village And and his new brother in law shows up, who may be working for the British.
This film was perfectly entertaining and had some good action bit, but 1 thought it lacked a lot of the charm of the first film.
