Once Upon a Time in Vietnam Lửa Phật
Vietnam
Action-fantasy drama
2013, colour, 2.35:1, 106 mins
Directed by Dustin Nguyễn
By Derek Elley
Mon, 11 November 2013, 09:00 AM (HKT)
Ambitious mish-mash of martial arts and US western rarely gets its wheels off the ground. Asian and genre events.
Story
Vietnam. After his motorcycle breaks down in the desert, swordsman Đạo (Dustin Nguyễn) gets a lift to a small town by the sea. He is one of an elite group of warriors known as The Masters, dedicated to the protection of the nation under The Emperor (Jason Ninh Cao) and reporting directly to General Long (Roger Yuan). Any master who deserts his post is liable to death when tracked down. Next day, Đạo rents an outhouse owned by a baker, Hiền (Thái Ḥa), and his wife, Ánh (Veronica Ngô), who have a young son, Hùng (Nguyễn Hoàng Quân). The town is controlled by local saloon bar owner Tính (Xuân Phát), who is trying to force Hiền to sell his bakery business by sending round sidekick Huy (Hiếu Hiền) and some heavies. Đạo temporarily scares them off. But it turns out that the master swordsman has his own motive in visiting the town.
Review
A mish-mash of everything from spaghetti and American westerns to Asian action movies, with nods to apocalyptic biker movies and costume dramas, Once Upon a Time in Vietnam Lửa Phật is a just-okay action-fantasy that rarely gets its wheels off the ground for very long. Of less interest if it had come from a more developed film industry than Vietnam's, it marks an ambitious directing debut by Saigon-born, US-raised actor-cum-martial artist Dustin NGUYỄN, 51, who's best known in the US for the TV police drama 21 Jump Street (1987-91) and action-drama VIP (1998-2002) and in Vietnam for his roles of the secret police head in period martial arts blockbuster The Rebel Ḍng máu anh hùng (2007) and the alcoholic father in the rural drama Floating Lives Cánh đồng bất tận (2010).
Set in a deliberately timeless world of master-warriors who ride motorbikes and converse with monks on cloud-wreathed mountain tops, its dominant frame of reference is actually the American western. Most of the action takes place in a small seaside town in which a wandering hero embroils himself in the lives of an honest baker and his family who are being pressured to sell by the local saloon owner. For his own reasons, the hero is looking for the wife, and for a linked reason the hero's superior comes looking for both of them, with the expected high-street showdown.
Martial arts westerns have been around for some time now, and Nguyễn, who also wrote the rather bumpily constructed script, doesn't add much that is new, apart from making fire a weapon in the heroes' arsenal. The film's main attraction is its simplicity, with an elemental storyline and characters that play out in a very vanilla way, and clean-looking photography by Wych KAOSAYANANDA วิชช์ เกาไศยนันท์, a Thai director whose credits include the expensive heist movie Fah ฟ้า (1998) and (under the name Kaos) the extremely average US action movie Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002), with Antonio Banderas and Lucy LIU 劉裕玲.
The action, staged by stuntman-actor BÙI Vӑn Hải (Shanghai Knights (2003)), is okay when it gets going an hour or so into the film with a set-to in a saloon bar between Nguyễn's swordsman and the bald villain played with more physical presence by Chinese-American actor-martial artist Roger YUAN. Real action aficionados, however, have to wait another 10 minutes for actress-singer-model Veronica NGÔ — who was memorably hot in contemporary action film Clash Bẫy rồng (2009) — to finally climb into her leathers and get into the rough-and-tumble. Ngô has a few moments, but they're not on a par with the earlier film's hardboiled action.
The original Vietnamese title means Fire Buddha. The original English title was Monk on Fire.
Reply With Quote
