“Wu Dang takes place in the early days of the Republican China, where a treasure is hidden in the mountains. An American man looking for riches brings his daughter to martial arts competition, so that she can compete in a tournament in Kung Fu combat. He plans to find the gold that is located in that area. It won’t be easy for him, as dedicated protectors and a budding romance threaten his plans. Soon the true nature of the prize is revealed and everything changes for him.
There are some films that you truly like all the action, but the film falls flat as a whole when it comes down to the essentials. That was truly the case with “Wu Dang”.
The direction for the most part was okay. The action component was very good. I liked how director Patrick Leung and his action director Corey Yuen carefully planned the film’s action scenes. There were some sequences in the film that grab your attention. Both of them made sure that those scenes stand out. It made the fight sequences good, even though this film felt like it had no screenplay. The acting aspects were not good. Leung doesn’t do a good job trying to make the performances aspects work as a whole. These characters were good during the action sequences, but there was no life in the cast performances when it came down to the film’s dialogue. I was bored watching these actors trying to deliver dialogue without any emotion. At the end of the day, the performances do matter even if the action sequences are good. Sadly, there wasn’t much attention paid to that aspect.
When you sitting there and thinking about other things, during a movie then the story is a complete failure. That’s what I felt with this film’s screenplay. The screenplay written by Chan Kahn was flat out awful. This film had bad screenplay all over it, when you feel out of place in the film’s story at the beginning. I felt like, there was something missing that could’ve developed the main character’s relationship with his daughter instead of jumping into an action scene right away. It made me not care about the characters. After a couple of action sequences after that, I lost interest in this film. The film just got worse from there. Kahn doesn’t do anything to try and save the screenplay. Instead, the film continues to make more mistakes.
Another thing that I didn’t like about this film was the characters. For an action film like this to work, you need characters to be likeable and not dull. That was one of the main reasons that I lost interest in the story. I know that this is a foreign language film, but you need the characters to be interesting. I was bored watching them. And finally, the film felt like it had no plot. He spends most of his time trying to come up with fight sequences. That hurts any chance for any character development.
This is one of those films, where I hate to give the dreaded rating. I thought the fight scenes were good, but the acting and screenplay hurts “Wu Dang” from becoming at least a watchable film.
Review Rating: One Star
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