AKA: Dragon Tattoo

Director: Fruit Chan

Cast: Max Zhang Jin, Annie Liu Xin-You, Anderson Silva, Stephy Tang Lai-Yan, Kevin Cheng Ka-Wing, Lam Suet, Richard Ng, Hugo Ng Doi-Yung

Running Time: 100 min.

By Paul Bramhall

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a huge fan of when directors that have a distinctive style decide to take on the martial arts genre. From Peter Chan’s take on the wuxia genre with 2011’s Wu Xia, to Wong Kar-Wai’s interpretation of Ip Man in 2013’s Grandmaster, to Soi Cheang’s suitably gritty 2015 sequel SPL II: A Time for Consequences. Each of them maintained their respective sense of style and tone, while equally delivering on the promise of some action that’s such an integral part of making a kung fu flick. So it’s fair to say I felt a tad excited when I heard that Fruit Chan was also going to be dipping his feet into the world of fists and kicks.

Chan’s carved out his own distinctive voice in the world of Hong Kong cinema, and having been active as a director since the early 90’s, some of his most well regarded titles include the likes of Made in Hong Kong, the Dumplings segment in the horror anthology Three…Extremes (which would go on to be turned into a feature length movie), and The Midnight After. Over 25 years since his debut, it’s taken until 2019 for Chan to take a crack at a martial arts flick, which arrives in the form of The Invincible Dragon.

Casting kung fu man of the moment Max Zhang, hot off the heels of headlining The Brink and Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy, the plot see’s Zhang in the kind of angry cop role that Donnie Yen used to have cornered in the 1990’s. He’s introduced as a black eye-line wearing undercover cop (because nothing screams legitimate gangster like black eye-liner), whose activities have aroused the suspicions of the big boss, played by Lam Suet. As a fan of Hong Kong cinema, there’s something mysteriously reassuring about seeing Lam Suet onscreen, almost as if his presence alone makes the production feel legitimately HK. He doesn’t stick around long though, as no sooner has he appeared than Zhang ruthlessly shoots his arm off, in one of the most bloodless decapitations ever committed to screen. Exit Lam Suet, enter confused viewer.

With Zhang established as the hot-headed cop, the plot emerges to involve the hunt for a serial killer who targets female cops. When Zhang’s own fiancé (Stephy Tang, The Empty Hands) is kidnapped by the killer during a sting, his failure to save her sends him into a spiral of depression, OCD, and underground boxing. The story picks up several years later, when after a long silence it appears the serial killer may have become active again after a female cop is murdered in Macau. With Zhang now a dishevelled shadow of his former self, the re-emergence of the killer gives him a glimmer of hope that he could still find his fiancé alive, and gives him the purpose needed to spring back into action (minus the black eye-liner).

In perhaps the biggest non-spoiler reveal of the year, the serial killer turns out to be UFC legend Anderson Silva (who we meet via him jumping out of a bathtub in slow motion. I’m serious). After essentially playing himself in small supporting parts in D-grade MMA flicks like Never Surrender and Tapped Out, here he gets top billing opposite Zhang, and the pair share some of the most excruciatingly painful English dialogue you’re ever likely to hear. In one scene at the police station, Silva reacts to Zhang’s dragon tattoo, and says with a deadpan expression, “In Hong Kong people love animals”. Kevin Cheng, playing another cop, then replies with a similar deadpan expression, “Yes, we do.” The script is literally full of baffling exchanges such as the above. In another scene Silva yells “You need to die or be killed!”, and at one point the cops identify that Silva is “speaking Brazilian.”

Worse still, Silva’s partner is played by Juju Chan, and together they deserve an award for the least convincing onscreen couple of the century. Silva can’t act, and his slightly effeminate line delivery doesn’t do him any favours in the imposing bad guy department. Juju Chan fares slightly better, but really that’s only because the bar has been set so low. Zhang himself is clearly in a role several leagues out of his limited range. His cop on the edge requires the kind of nuance and intensity that an actor like Liao Fan or Tony Leung Chiu-Wai make look effortless, but Zhang throws himself at the role with all the subtlety of a bull in a China shop.

Frankly, Invincible Dragon is a mind-bending misfire that lands so far off the mark, it becomes a train wreck that’s impossible to look away from. Quite what Chan was looking to achieve is, in its current form, almost impossible to say. The whole thing is intermittently narrated in retrospect by a narrator who sounds like he’s just come out of a coma, and provides odd disclaimers whenever they’re needed to ensure things stay China-friendly. When the plot threatens to imply that Zhang may in fact be mentally unstable, the narrator jumps in to inform us that “From a medical perspective….”, and remind us that he has depression and OCD. It’s bizarre.

But without doubt the most bizarre element of Invincible Dragon, is the dragon itself. Zhang has a fixation with a 9-headed dragon that saved him from drowning when he was a kid, so much so that he has it tattooed all over his torso, and has been waiting for it to show itself again ever since. I enjoyed the intrigue behind the concept of the dragon, and was trying to figure out which part of Zhang’s psyche each of the 9 heads represented. Alas, I was overthinking things. As it turns out, there actually is a 9-headed dragon lurking in the waters of Hong Kong, and in the final fight which pits Zhang versus Silva, it shows up to lend a hand. Yes, if you thought a killer whale turning up to help Andy Lau in Moon Warriors was over the top, trust me when I say you ain’t seen nothing yet. The arrival of the dragon knock’s Chan’s latest off the rails, into orbit, before landing on an astral plane that as humans we’re still not evolved enough to understand.

If only the action was as bombastic and absurd as everything that surrounds it, The Invincible Dragon may still have held some goodwill, however the usually reliable pairing of Stephen Tung Wei (Fox Hunter) and Jack Wong (Keeper of Darkness) is here surprisingly uninspired and lacklustre. A scooter chase which should have taken a few notes from In the Line of Duty 4 unfolds at a snail’s pace, with stunts that would put even the most forgiving action fan to sleep. Zhang faces off against Juju Chan in a train that (much like the movie itself) goes off the rails, and they continue to fight as it spins through the air, which somehow feels more exciting to write than it was to actually watch. The real issue though is Silva, as it becomes apparent that nobody knew how to apply his skillset to a screen fighting aesthetic. The choreography of his fight with Zhang is pedestrian, and the danger of watching him in the ring is nullified as a screen fighter.

Thankfully though, everything else about their confrontation has the absurd dial cranked up to 11, making for an unintentionally hysterical end to a consistently head scratching 95 minutes. Zhang and Silva yell insults at each other throughout the fight, and they both take turns at yelling “That’s my line!” back at each other to certain put-downs. It’s awesome. The fight even has the audacity to lift wholesale the drawing pins to the face scene from The Night Comes for Us, but luckily they’re just getting started. Ending up on the top of Macau Tower, Zhang gets in touch with his inner-crazy (think a sanitised version of Leung Kar Yan at the end of Thundering Mantis), and what follows involves a side-splitting mix of bungee jumping, lines like “Let’s fly!”, and action that’s as awkward as the acting.

Is The Invincible Dragon some kind of in-joke that only Fruit Chan understands, or is it a legitimate attempt to make a fusion of the thriller, martial arts, and fantasy genres? Chances are we’ll never know the answer, and maybe that’s for the best. At one point Silva yells “Enough, stop!”, and it could just as well have been a line that Fruit Chan would have benefitted from hearing when he pitched the idea for The Invincible Dragon. Ranking up there with the likes of Switch and The Bounty Hunters, it’s an unfathomably incomprehensible disaster, but one that would no doubt make for a fun watch under the correct circumstances.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 2/10