(by Bruce Demara thestar.com 10-31-13)
Starring Tiger Hu Chen, Keanu Reeves. Directed by Keanu Reeves.
If you’re going to make a kick-ass martial arts movie, you’d better have a tiger on tap.
Keanu Reeves, making his directorial debut with
Man of Tai Chi, has chosen wisely and well in selecting
Tiger Hu Chen to play the hero. Without Chen in the lead role, Man of Tai Chi could easily have been chop-socky awful.
The plot isn’t exactly original. Donaka Mark (played by Reeves) is the head of a Hong Kong-based security firm who runs a lucrative sideline: a fight club of sorts catering to the idle rich in which competitors eventually battle to the death.
Mark spots a rising young talent in Chen Lin-Hu (could they not have given him another name than his actual birth name?), a practitioner of tai chi-inspired martial arts.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of urging to persuade Chen to start scrapping for dollars despite a severe admonition of his master, Yang, that doing so is “dishonourable.”
Will Chen allow “dark chi” to consume his otherwise gentle nature? Will policewoman Sun Jingshi be able to unmask the dastardly head of the fighting ring? Will the man in the black mask turn out to be Mark himself? It won’t take a degree in rocket science to work out the answer to any of these questions.
Fortunately, Chen, whom Reeves
knows because of his stunt and fight work on
The Matrix trilogy, is an appealing protagonist with his thick mop of hair and genial everyman appeal. He’s also a heck of a martial artist and the fight scenes, varied and plentiful, are easily the best parts of the movie.
Karen Mok is a wonderfully indomitable policewoman and Yu Hai is suitably wise and venerable as Master Yang.
“You have power, not control,” Yang warns his young acolyte to little avail, although the money Chen earns certainly helps put some spit and polish on the aged temple that authorities are threatening to condemn.
Reeves, whose appeal as an actor remains an inscrutable mystery, bares his teeth here and there. But as a villain, he’s barely passable. Only in Reeves’ opaque stare do we sense the sociopath lurking beneath the character’s surface.
But Reeves provides serviceable direction and his wretched acting isn’t sufficient to mar this passably pleasing martial arts adventure.
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https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2013/10/31/tai_chi_man_kicks_butt_thanks_to_tiger.html
