100 Yards is directed by the Xu brothers, Haofeng and Junfeng, and it’s a great martial arts movie – though any more than that is a stretch. The martial arts sequences are spectacular, the fighting epic, the moves expertly choreographed and it’s shot the proper way – so you can see how good the combatants are not how nimble the editor is. But between the spectacular set pieces things tend to go a bit limp. Gentle, if we’re being kind, or elegant maybe.
It’s all set in 1920s Tianjin, which is another part of its appeal, and opens with an old kung fu master about to breathe his last. Shen An (Jacky Heung), the old man’s son, naturally expects dad to leave the fight academy to him, but instead the dying master leaves it to his star pupil, Qu Quan (Andy On).
This sets up the beef that will run through the entire movie, propelling Shen An and Qu Quan into one fight after another. I won that one, one of the guys will say, at which point the other guy will pipe up with an “I demand a rematch”, in so many words. So that’s what they do, clash, repeatedly and, it must be said, very entertainingly.
The Xu brothers obviously think this isn’t quite enough and so there are shadowy side stories and an attempt at a consideration about the place of kung fu in those days – not respectable, in short (the “100 yards” is about as far as the academy’s influence extends) – and some detailing of life under the colonial French who ran this part of China at the time.
Women also get a decent shake, with two good parts going to Li Yuan as the academy’s very stylish chairwoman. Dressed in men’s clothes and a bowler hat (there are a lot of bowler hats in this movie) she cuts quite the dash, but does no actual fighting. This is left to Tang Shiyi as Gui Ying, a formidable fighter who gets an entire sequence set in an office, where she fights off male assailants by the dozen using set squares and other bits of found weaponry.
The period detail is fantastic and technically the film is superb. The camera whirl about the fighters, but also do great glorious swoops to introduce new locales and sometimes soar into the sky just because they can. An Wei’s score is also a gorgeous thing and gives us spaghetti western twangs here and there to indicate exactly what it is that the Xus think they are up to – a homage of sorts to Sergio Leone, who was never this busy but would recognise the canted angles, the intense close-ups and the use of silence as a dramatic device.
The last 45 minutes or so is really just an extended fight sequence, but we get given breathers here and there, and the Xus also ring the changes by varying the fighting styles of the sacrificial boneheads who hurl themselves at one man or another. These fight extras all look like they can fight – Xu Haofeng studied martial arts before turning to moviemaking and he’s obviously keen for this to be authentic in terms of the old kung fu.
Muddying the clear throughline is a question over who the good guy is here. Shen An appears to be the wronged party but the permascowl on the face of Jacky Heung suggests bad guy. Andy On radiates peaceful vibes as the assistant who got lucky and won the academy, but Qi Quan’s behaviour once in charge isn’t above board. Nuance, I think it’s called, with some loss of the simple joy of rooting for the good guy.
So there you have it. If fighting does it for you, really good fighting, then 100 Yards will do it for you too. If it doesn’t, it’s unlikely that the thin glue holding this movie together will really satisfy.
100 Yards – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
