10# - Wild Card

Jing Wu

Wolf Warrior is a 2015 action film directed and staring Jing Wu as a Chinese special forces soldier who like all good action heroes does things his own way. In other words he is a loose cannon and those skills apart from getting him punished get him a new job, as a Wolf Warrior part of elite branch of the already elite special forces. However before I continue with the review of the film I first have to say that the reason that I even watched this film is because of the article I did on Chinese YouTuber Accented Cinema who was discussing why he think Chinese films are currently pretty bad at the moment. He showed as examples critically acclaimed films like the 1991 film Hang the Red Lantern but he also showed the film Wolf Warrior as a not so critically acclaimed film. He talked about this film and its sequel Wolf Warrior 2 are "war" films that portray China's military strength but, also have messages saying to whoever the enemy to beware. The second part of his point is definitely true with a character in Wolf Warrior stating, " Those who challenge China's resolve will have no place to hide." The one thing I will take issue with is that this is not a "war" film because their is no war in the movie, it is just an action movie with military hardware everywhere. The film serves more as a display of military hardware, tanks, helicopters, infantry doing maneuvers with all of the latest and greatest gear.


This really shows in the main villains of the film who are at the beginning a foreign drug smuggling operation that our hero Leng Feng, his special forces unit, and the Chinese police must break up. This is where our main character gets himself locked up for being a wild card and as I said ultimately ends up a Wolf Warrior, this is where he meets the cast of cliches that are in the unit. The Chinese equivalent of the yokel chewing straw, the hard-ass sergeant who dosent like him, the guy who has a little girl as his only defining trait, and his sexy female commanding officer who he has tension with. After this are characters participate in a training exercise where we get to see how good Leng Feng and we also get to see more tanks, helicopters, and stuff. Once again I need to state that their is not anything inherently wrong with that in a film it is just the way that it is handled, everything in this film is shot in a very flat, boring, and not interestingly lit way. Action scenes dont really seem to have much if any atmosphere or tension as things just kind of happen in plain and generic way. There for the most part is not really any impact in many of the actions scenes and some of them look god awful like when Leng Feng and his team have to fight off a pack of wolves. That being said that action is not all bad there are a few times when the film cut to first person cameras so that everything becomes claustrophobic and personal the actions does look somewhat better. There is also a flashback scene that I though looked better but not much else was.

Scott Adkins

This is the way the action is until the villains show up and they are team of foreign mercenaries who are all American or British which is not surprising to me. Considering the speech that one of the characters gives im guessing that these mercenaries are stand ins for the nations that actors are from. These mercenaries are however hired by a Chinese drug kingpin so that they can kill Leng Feng, because Feng killed the kingpins brother in the drug raid at the beginning of the film. These mercenaries whose names are only said about once during the film are lead by English actor and marshal artist Scott Adkins. All of these English speaking actors are either not directed very well as Jing Wu was not familiar with directing English speakers or they just decided to dub in their dialogue later either way their performances are wooden. They are just very one dimensional villains with not much personality so when they are killed off it really does not seem like much of anything was accomplished. During the scenes of direct fighting between the Chinese army and the mercenaries these parts of the movie are actually filmed better but they are still missing something. I really am not sure what but it just feels like there is not really any punch or weight to any thing that happens in the film even soldiers are killed. The action in the film is contradictory as it has it feet in two worlds, that of the realistic war film where there is strong attention to the way soldiers move, hold their weapons, look,where people die quick, or gruesome deaths.  It wants to be that in a way or at least look like that and also wants to be a mid 80's or early 90's action film. Something that Stallone or Arnold would not be in, but someone like Chuck Norris would be that caliber of action film. You will have scenes where soldiers are ripped apart by snipers and booby traps, but then their will be a fight scene between a little Chinese soldier and a giant mercenary with comedic editing. Leng Feng is the perfect example of this he moves, looks, shoots like a real person but in the course of this film he is shot around 9 times to little effect. There are some films where people get shot quite a few times and keep going but being shot makes their lives miserable. Leng Feng can take a bullet just barely flinch and keep sprinting at a full clip into a fist fight.

Later in the film after most of the mercenaries are dead it is reveled that this drug kingpin also has stole biological secrets and it going to sell them to a bio-pharmaceutical company which is going to make a strain of disease that can only a effect genetic Chinese people. This part of the plot comes up and we dont here anything else about it until the end of the film when Leng Feng recovers a briefcase full of blood vials. Which just makes it seem like the bad guy in this film during the first draft of the script was not actually bad enough so they had to also make him want to commit a genocide. The film wraps up like you would expect with our hero Leng Feng defeating Scott Adkins, although it was done in martial arts fight that was well done. Then the main villain the drug kingpin and his cronies try to escape disguised in Chinese military uniforms but is stopped after Leng Feng kills all of them. Then he and the cliches come home to heroes welcome where medals are handed out. Leng Feng and his love interest/commanding officer drive off into the sunset.

It is really surprising to me how much i found this film to be boring, cheap looking, and overall bad. I thought that from the clips AccentedCinema showed and just the little I knew about the film I wouldn't like it but, I did not expect to be so uninteresting. This movie is not really worth anyone's time or money unless you just want to see the state of Chinese action movies in a modern setting. Where the gear, guns, vehicles, and the overall almost pornographic quality of all of it is on full display. This film is right in line with some of the other clips of modern Chinese films that AccentedCinema showed strangely directed action scenes, unnatural dialogue, a reliance on CGI which makes the film look cheap, and trying to copy others while not doing it correctly.