Iron Monkey Review

Review of Iron Monkey (1993) by screenqueeen: 👍 4.5/5

after all these years i finally closed the circle on thinking to myself "i should finally watch the actual cut of IRON MONKEY." as a naive little 10 year old my mom took me to see the bastardized and intentionally butchered weinstein/tarantino miramax "treatment" of master Yuen Woo-Ping's first 1993 masterpiece (the second is TAI CHI MASTER, of course). the nuances of story and plot were completely lost on me mostly because i was 10 but looking back on what happened to this film in the 8 years it took since premiering in HK and debuting in america you'd think they let another 10 year old make executive changes on how the film should be.

going back to regarding the actual Hong Kong Woo-Ping intended cut, this is another instance where Peking opera style and wacky wire work stunts converge in a way that feels nearly Looney Tunes-like. if it was just Woo-Ping this would seem not quite in character for his style, but Tsui Hark produces and writes on IRON MONKEY, infusing a little bit of whatever was left in his system from ZU and whatever was coursing through his veins during GREEN SNAKE (if someone has that bottled let me know i'm trying to do more drugs these days). Hark makes this feel totally ok with getting silly with it, almost to the point of Raimi's QUICK AND THE DEAD with its serious depictions with slapstick comedy perforating the otherwise very real-seeming world.

impossible not to mention that Donnie Yen plays Wong Fei-Hung's dad in what some could treat as a DRUNKEN MASTER prequel chapter that builds on how the Wong family's medicine practice has evolved (but is kind of a boring way of looking at it since Fei-Hung is so prevalent across kung fu cinema as a whole). things get officially Shaw Bros ridiculous once the investigating Wonder Palm Monk shows up, kicking off proceedings that made me think that BASTARD SWORDSMAN would be the perfect b flick in a double feature. the final fight, waged completely on vertical wooden poles, quickly turns into the ultimate game of "the floor is lava" and brings an excitement and momentum that Lau Kar-Leung may have borrowed some energy from for the final fight in DRUNKEN MASTER II. which makes me feel more and more like a lot of these guys making kung fu films are riffing off of each other like musicians in the juiciest jam session when they're at their creative peaks.

Woo-Ping certainly was in the early 90s. and back when a barely decade-old me left the theater after credits rolled on the awful 2001 cut the memories came flooding back to me as i finished the 1993 cut in my mid 30s, making on-the-spot fight moves outside on the sidewalk with my best friend. because we had only been vessels for whatever version of IRON MONKEY was available to us, we were endowed with the spirit of Woo-Ping and Hark, celebrating it without knowing, exerting a sense of liberation that no censored or truncated version of HK kung fu cinema could hide or obscure. it continues to this day.