With 'Kung Fu Killer,’ Teddy Chen pays homage to stuntmen
By G. Allen Johnson Published 6:41 pm, Wednesday, April 22, 2015
The climactic fight in the martial arts joyride “Kung Fu Killer” has Donnie Yen battling villain Wang Baoqiang on a busy Hong Kong highway, with cars and trucks ****zing by. At one point, Wang gets kicked into the path of a truck and seemingly certain death when Yen pulls him back, temporarily saving his life.
“We’re not finished yet!” he growls.
Director Teddy Chen, an industry veteran for more than 30 years, laughs when recalling the shooting of that scene.
“I always wanted to do something on a highway,” Chen said via Skype from Hong Kong. “I told Donnie Yen, 'It’s like two people fighting in a great sea, and it’s full of sharks and whales, so they’re in great danger. They not only want to kill each other, but they are in a dangerous situation.’”
Chen has been around since he was a script continuity assistant in the 1980s, working his way up the Hong Kong movie food chain until becoming a director in the 1990s — he is best known for the Jackie Chan film “The Accidental Spy” (2001). Yen, 51, also began in the ’80s and has been a martial arts star for 20 years. So it’s no wonder that “Kung Fu Killer” has an old-school feel to it.
Just good old-fashioned stunt work in a crackling action picture.
The plot: Mo (Yen), a kung fu master, is in prison for accidentally killing a man. But when a serial killer is targeting other martial arts masters in Hong Kong, he convinces Detective Luk (Charlie Yeung, an actress and singer who hit stardom in the 1990s and is in the midst of a comeback) to release him and assist her team on capturing the killer.
Chen said he intentionally made the film in an old-fashioned way as a tribute to the Hong Kong stuntmen he has known.
“I saw so many stuntmen get wounded, because at that time, there were not so many ways to protect stuntmen,” Chen said. “They have to fight with their guts. ... In the first action film I did as a director (1997’s “Downtown Torpedoes”), a stuntman was killed in an explosion scene. It almost made me leave the film business. I was so unhappy and sad.”
Chen, who was not at fault for the incident, said he turned to religion to help him cope. Although he has made different types of films, including action films, since the incident (“Bodyguards and Assassins,” from 2009, won best picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards), he specifically made “Kung Fu Killer” to pay homage to the most dangerous job in the film industry.
“I told myself, I have to make an action film as a gift to those stuntmen, as a respect for the last 30 years in the business,” Chen said. “That’s why the killer doesn’t use a gun or a knife; he uses kung fu.”
Yen, who has appeared in Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” and the popular “Ip Man” films, helped Chen, a pal for two decades, realize his goal. Yen was a martial artist first, then broke into acting, making a big impression in a fight scene with Jet Li in “Once Upon a Time in China II” (1992).
“He’s the best action (choreographer) in Hong Kong,” Chen said. “He’s worked in Hollywood productions, and he brought that new technology and brought it back to Hong Kong, and put it in his stunt design.”
So it seems “Kung Fu Killer” is a rough action film made with tender, loving, expert care.
G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail:
ajohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BRfilmsAllen
If you go
Kung Fu Killer: Starts Friday at Bay Area theaters.
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