IRON MONKEY
Starring: Yu Rong Guang, Donnie Yen
Directed by: Yuen Woo Ping
Distributed by: Miramax

Date: 10/24/01
By: Gerry Wang

    The first thing I did after watching IRON MONKEY was look for my socks........ because fuck me they were knocked off! Har har har. But, I kid you not, I really was giddy like a schoolgirl. A movie hasn't kicked my ass like this since THE MATRIX. By the way, the fight scenes in that movie were piddling compared to the ones in IRON MONKEY, but there is one correlation: director/fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping.

    I have to admit I haven't seen a lot of kung fu flicks in my lifetime, but IRON MONKEY in no way transcended its genre ala CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, nor did it try to. Instead, all it sought to do was raise the bar of its genre and produce some dazzling fight sequences that make your jaw hit the floor. In this respect, it successful as a mofo.

Donnie Yen plays Wong Kei-Ying.

    Director/fight guru Yuen Woo Ping allows his actors to showcase their formidable talents in nearly every scene, pulling back the camera to give us a wide shot and just letting us soak in the kung fu mastery. He also infuses the movie w/ a mischievous sense of humor that got the audience in the theater laughing more than once, despite the fact the audio was Cantonese w/ English subtitles.

    The premise of IRON MONKEY is a pretty basic Robin Hood/vigilante-justice type of story. A kind doctor, played by Yu Rong Guang, masquerades as the Iron Monkey, a legendary figure that robs from the rich and gives to the poor. The authorities all want to nab this mysterious hero, and enact a witch hunt to weed out the Iron Monkey.

The kid could fight. Really.

    Caught in this witch hunt is Wong Kei-Ying (Donnie Yen), a wanderer and wushu god, and his son, the folk hero Wong Fei-Hung (female martial arts champion Tsang Sze-Man). They're taken prisoner along w/ half the town, and Wong Kei-Ying valiantly volunteers to find the perpetrator Iron Monkey and bring him to justice, in exchange for the freedom of the other prisoners.

    But he later discovers the town hates him for what he's doing, and doesn't know why until the Iron Monkey's true intentions are revealed to him. Along the way they team up, get into a lot of fights, and take on an evil Shaolin monk comes to town. The final set piece, involving balancing on poles stick out of a lake of flames, is amazing. Pure fluff, but damn entertaining, and that's the best way to describe IRON MONKEY.

I got an iron monkey for ya..... in my pants....

Yu Rong Guang is fucking awesome.

The monk is easily the most powerful dude in the movie.

Grade: A-
-- Jaw-dropping fight scenes that might just be the best I've ever seen of this genre.

Babe-o-meter: C
-- Jean Wang is OK looking, but if I passed by her on the street, I wouldn't recognize her face.