Photos courtesy of Netflix
I love martial arts movies. There’s nothing like watching people slug it out with equal levels of grace and raw power; I’ve lost count of how many
times I’ve seen “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” It’s so easy to completely enthrall yourself in the swinging, and the slicing and the complete disregard for gravity or physics. So I have to commend “Iceman” for being the first martial arts film I’ve seen so far that was so annoying it bored me.
The first installment of a saga, the plot centers around He Ying (Donnie Yen), a Ming Dynasty officer framed for treason and buried under snow and ice for 400 years. After
*yawn*
the truck that carries his cryogenically frozen body crashes, he wakes up in modern day Hong Kong. He finds friendship in May (Shengyi Huang) as he navigates this unfamiliar millennium trying to realign his karma, and find his way home through a magical golden wheel. All the while, his efforts are thwarted by a corrupt Chief of Police (Simon Yam), and two comrades who turned on him (Kang Yu and Baoqiang Wang) and were also dormant in the ice.
What ensues is a whirlwind of fart jokes, dick jokes and enough cheese to go with a mountain of crackers. There are some beautiful moments of action, but it’s overshadowed by the ridiculous dialogue and total lack of any damn sense.
For a time travel movie about a man who wakes up after a 400-year nap, He Ying, his two comrades and May are uncomfortably cool with the whole thing. You’d expect a little more culture shock, or at least some difficulty when it comes to handling a tablet or a cellphone. They all ease into the situation too easily and it’s infuriating. Sure, we get the comic relief of watching the hero drink out of a toilet bowl, but there’s a serious lack of the cherished confusion we get from the time travel genre.
Then there’s the whole business of the golden wheel: an ancient Hindu time-traveling machine what will only work three times and self destruct. It can only be activated
Ying can also apparently piss for yards. How essential to the plot.
with Linga — a geode with a face, believed to be Shiva’s penis — and a secret mantra told only to Ying. I have a few questions. First: why are you entrusting this sacred Hindu object to a guard of the Ming Dynasty? You’ve never met him before, and you’re just going on a hunch about his good nature. Second: do we really need the added commentary on the size of Shiva’s penis? I get that like many Cantonese comedic martial arts movies there is some room for a dick joke, but it ruins the moment. Third: for such an important plot point in a saga, why do you barely even bring it up? It seems they put so much of their budget into exploding toilets and wardrobe that they couldn’t fit the whole time-traveling machine into the time-traveling movie enough.
Donnie Yen has established himself over the years as one the best actors in the genre, so you’ll spend most of your time watching this asking how he got dragged into it in the first place. That’s not to say that he didn’t do a good job, but he had to
We need to talk about your wig, Mr. Yen.
work with the ridiculous package he was given. He Ying is your typical, upstanding military general with an inflated sense of honor. He’s a big sweetie who loves his mother and does his best to do right by people, but there’s just something cold about him. You don’t totally fall in love, and you don’t hate him: he houses that dreaded middle ground between complete lack of charisma and an overexertion to be liked. Director Wing-cheon Law tries to bounce the character between a teddy bear and a crow bar and the result is dizzying. The best they did to balance the two is a scene where Ying applies serious percussion therapy on May’s invalid mother to heal her. So I commend you Mr. Yen, but I’m also confused and disappointed.
And here we see a badass dragging her unconscious friend to a hospital on her vespa.
I am relieved, however, at May. They’ve steered away from the damsel in distress trope — unlike so many women in action movies that only do well as part of the scenery — and made her useful as well as cute. She doesn’t sit around in her neon fur coats and hope that her prince will make it out okay. She works hard to pay for her mother’s medical care, fighting off perverts in the process, but still has room to give. May weaves herself into the action and doesn’t let up, lending a hand or floorspace whenever it’s needed as both the landlord and a romantic interest. You go girl.
I sincerely hope that the sequel scheduled for later this year picks off where it left as a more cohesive film with less plot holes. In the meantime, I’ll be healing my mental wounds with “Kung Fu Hustle” and “Ip Man.“
