High-flying athleticism and extraordinary beauty
A wonderfully energetic showcase of high-flying athleticism and extraordinary beauty, Martial Arts of Shaolin is a spectacular, fast-paced and frequently sensational celebration of Lau Kar-leung's love for less fantastical martial arts, constantly pushing for the tenets of discipline, pacifism and tolerance. It's far less traditional than most of the typical Shaw Brothers output. There's no set or soundstage to be found here, with beautiful mountains, ancient cities and temples, and rolling green pastures hosting hundreds of extras in a lavish, large-scale epic. It does boast some fairly interesting meditations on Buddhism and the limits of pacifism in the face of injustice. However, this is about as straight-laced a revenge story as you could ask for, although the motivation for said revenge isn't even revealed until the very end; thus, it looks like the characters are just being arseholes to everyone they meet, it's a story that only exists to provide a framework for increasingly elaborate displays of physical skill and in that department, it's no slouch. Lau's direction is sublime; every bout feels like a natural one-upmanship of each other. Fights are fast without becoming incomprehensible, with a wonderful amount of variety, from traditional weapons combat to hand-to-hand duels and large-scale confrontations; the sheer physicality is exceptional. As one of Jet Li's earliest performances, there's a ripe youthful vigour about it, effortlessly switching between comedy and commanding when required; he has a tremendous screen presence, even when he is doing very little beyond demonstrating how impossibly fast he can move. He is astonishing. His speed, balance and precision are almost unreal, whether he is fighting with his bare hands, staff, sword or other weapons. The climax is where everything comes together, and after the slower character and training material, the film unleashes a succession of increasingly elaborate fights, culminating in a spectacular final confrontation. By this point, Martial Arts of Shaolin's relatively thin and increasingly uneven story hardly matters: the sheer skill of the performers and Lau's choreography provide all the momentum necessary, although far from one of his deepest or most sophisticated films, judging it purely as a showcase for classical kung fu, it is enormously entertaining.
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