Unbored

I’ve been watching a lot of martial arts movies recently for research purposes. I’d love my job if I actually got paid for it sometimes. While Bruce Lee has to be the hardest man in the universe, and Jackie Chan revolutionised martial art flicks by combining them with comedy, of all the leading men in these movies, I have found the greatest respect for Jet Li. What really strikes me as funny the fact that I didn’t decide this based off of his performance in Fearless one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, but for the worst martial arts movies I’ve seen so far on this little venture… including The Karate Kid!

I am of course talking about Unleashed, which was called Danny the Dog outside the UK and US, probably because it sounds like a heart-warming animated Disney flick, I like to think they were just messing with audiences at this point trying to see how many families they could lure to this film.

The movie stars Jet Li as the sometimes titular Danny who has been raised as a sort of kung-fu attack dog by a bunch of cockney gangsters in Scotland complete with a collar that only gets taken off when he’s supposed to kill people. It’s only when he meets a blind piano tuner played by Morgan Freeman that he finds himself being treated like a human being.

Why is this film set in Glasgow when everyone’s cockney? There’s a bit where Morgan Freeman called a supermarket ‘The best shop in Glasgow’ and I thought he was making a rather witty joke without hammering the punch line that they were actually in London over the audience’s head… But no, apparently American’s don’t care what accent we have as long as we sound quaint and British. I should write a movie set in America where everyone speaks in Cambodian accents and see how they feel.

One thing that quite surprised me about this movie was how few fight scenes there were. I picked this movie because it was Jet Li and I thought it was going to be about him having a magic collar that unleashed his power and let him beat the shit out of people… Instead we’re shown his tortured broken life and how he comes to terms with himself… and then he beats the shit out of people.

I was genuinely impressed by Jet Li’s performance in this film… he actually saves this mediocre, flaccid mess. He’s as brilliant as ever in his fight scenes but outside the combat he conveys a childlike innocence and sadness from his horrible upbringing that I found myself wanting to give him a hug, his performance made me forget that he’s a professional martial artist who could break me with his fingers. Morgan Freeman is rather bland in comparison…

Let me rephrase that.

Jet Li gives a better performance than Morgan Freeman!

Was Morgan on an off day? Did he just decide to phone it in? I don’t know, but he should be ashamed of himself because Jet absolutely outshines him in this film. It’s not his best film, not by a long shot when you have films like Fearless, the Forbidden Kingdom and Hero under your belt. But sometimes it’s the bad movies that really show you a good actor when they don’t have a good script to back them up. Jet Li took this piss-weak film and wrung a captivating performance out of it!

For a martial arts film, it has way too few fight scenes. But the ones that are there are fast, brutal and cleverly done, and it’s not like Jet’s not done other movies with fighting in them. It’s offensively stupid in some parts and you’re better off with Mr Li’s other movies if you have the choice (Kiss of the Dragon is another good one!) But if someone puts a gun to your head or something, you could do much worse.