Top tier opening credits
It's fascinating that for his second film as a director, Lau Kar-Leung would choose to create his own version of the Wong Fei-hung legend, ever the visionary though, Challenge of the Masters sees Lau decide to concentrate his attentions on a young, callow Wong Fei-hung in what was a near-revolutionary statement at the time. Although the film's title implies plenty of duelling, it actually thrives less on narrative surprise and more on the sheer pleasure of watching mastery forged through discipline, pain, and stubborn will. This is not the confident folk hero of later stories, but a hot-headed, frequently humiliated young man whose talent is obvious and whose character is very much under construction. Obviously, being Lau's second film as a director yields plenty of rough edges; his filmmaking style not quite knuckled down yet. Grounding the limited action in a sense of lineage and authenticity, the few martial arts bouts that do make an appearance are to his usual standard, although they aren't the focal point of the film, as more emphasis is given to rigorous and realistic training sequences. The sequences dominate the film, staged with an almost documentary clarity; every improvement feels earned, every strike the product of repetition and refinement. Being this is Gordon Liu's first leading role, he plays Wong with an engaging mix of arrogance and vulnerability, a brilliant feat as he lets us enjoy both his cocky missteps and his gradual emotional tempering. There's a gentle humour running throughout, especially in the mentor-student dynamic, but it never undermines the seriousness of the training or the respect for tradition. While the simple narrative thrust of Challenge of the Masters is enough for most filmmakers, a director of Lau Kar-Leung's lustre requires something a bit meatier to get his teeth into, yet the film still manages to offer up a well-balanced combination of action, drama and moral philosophy, albeit with repetitive redundancy and some wobbly pacing. Opening credits are top-tier, though.
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