Xu Haofeng’s The Final Master, making its
North American debut at the Seattle International Film Festival, is a throwback
to classic wuxia films in every sense. A story fraught with ambition, loyalty,
and betrayal, it wears the scope and aesthetic texture of its predecessors. Set
in China of the 1930s, there are familiar themes of old versus new, changing
times and tides, increasing western encroachment, and impending war.
This is both a boon and a hindrance. Fans of martial arts films will
find much to laud, as The Final Master ticks off the
relevant boxes. While it hits all of the marks, however, it does little to
distinguish itself. An admirable facsimile in its own right, it’s easy to
wonder why watch this as opposed to countless other earlier films.
Wing Chun master Chen Shi (Liao Fan, Black Coal, Thin Ice) comes to the city of Tianjin in the days before World War
II in order to fulfill his dead master’s dreams of bringing this fighting style
to the Chinese north by establishing his own dojo. To accomplish this, he must
train a protégé, Geng Liang Chen (Song Yang, Judge Archer),
to defeat eight other schools.
If you’re familiar with wuxia at all, you know this plot
backwards and forwards. Not only it is thin and not particularly original, it’s
quite similar to Xu’s The Sword Identity (which also
features Song Yang) and Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster,
which Xu wrote. In short, he’s not blazing any new trails here.
Within this familiar framework, The Final
Master, while passably enjoyable, does little to stand apart from a
herd of better, earlier films. The twisted mash of shifting allegiances,
backstabbing, and rival schools becomes a tangle of solidly choreographed,
though hardly noteworthy, fight scenes; heavy-handed allegory; and flavorless
performances that don’t do the stiff, wooden dialogue any favors. The
impression is given that these stoic exteriors are intended to mask more inner
depth, but that rarely, if ever, shines through—Shi’s humanity may be a bit too
well concealed beneath his cryptic exterior.
Xu attempts to give the story more heft, with moderate
results. Chen Shi’s marriage of convenience to Zhao Guohui (Song Jia,
Once Upon a Time in Tibet) has the makings of a complex,
unique romance. Though this is ultimately unexplored as The Final Master
pushes it to the side in favor of typical fight scenes—even a tightly contained
sequence where Chen Shi fights his way through a line of fellow masters in a
narrow alley is standard fare—and a plot so overfull it’s difficult to tell
what exactly is going on. The most interesting, engaging threads are eschewed
for standard genre trappings, and any momentum built up dissipates—there are
simply too many stories going on for any one to take precedence.
The same can be said of Chen Shi’s backstory, which involves
learning martial arts after his wealthy family has their lands seized. This
could have been an opportunity to link to some of the inherent historical
aspects of the time and place, but The Final Master settles
for minor hints and innuendo. Or even Jiang Wenli’s (Farewell My
Concubine) Master Zou, the androgynous leader of a rival school, who wields
authority in the world of Tianjin’s dojos, could have been much more.
Potentially intriguing themes and ideas appear from time to time, only to be
sidestepped for more common and recognizable, thus more tedious, elements.
The strength of The Final Master is the look.
Cinematographer Wang Tianlin shoots the period setting with a keen, inventive
eye, and creates a lush color palate. With the near-grainy consistency of the images,
this could have sprung from the Shaw Brothers studios in the 1970s, which adds
to the throwback sensibility, despite the uninspired fight scenes. On the other
hand, An Wei’s score feels incongruous with the surrounding film and the era. More
analogous with the driving, and period appropriate, funk of Enter the Dragon, it’s a disconcerting, disingenuous component.
Though The Final Master has some quirks
and peculiarities—a noticeable lack of gender imbalance, chief among
these—there is, ultimately, never enough to make it truly stand out. Xu Haofeng’s
latest has on obvious affinity for the martial arts films that inspired it, and
has an authentic period wuxia feel, but never steps beyond those boundaries.
[Grade: B-]
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