Movies: "Jet Li's Fearless"

Huo Yuan Jia is the sorta-true story of a very famous martial artist of turn-of-the-century China. Jet Li has, of course, mined this vein before (in "Fist of Legend," he even played a fictional student of Huo Yuan Jia). What's notable about this film, however, is that it's supposedly Jet Li's final martial arts epic.

The story is the sort of pedestrian plot that serves its purpose as a framework for the fight choreography. Jet Li, while undoubtedly skilled at kung fu even at his advanced age, isn't really flexing much in the way of acting muscle here. The continued references to China as the "sick man of Asia" now look particularly out of place for Western audiences - the only major debate now, it seems, is how fast and how far China's dominance will spread in the 21st century.

The production design, despite using some obvious CGI, is usually fairly sumptuous. Most impressive is an extended fight through a restaurant in which the structure suffers greatly for being in the same scene with two wushu masters. Perhaps most telling is the final philosophy extolled by Li's character - that people should seek to use martial arts to better themselves, not to destroy others needlessly.

7/10