Hi! Welcome to The Silver Spleen.
My name is Peter McNeeley and this is my review of
WE ARE LEGENDS.
One of the hardest things to do in film-making
(or the film industry)
is to create a style or a signature
that you could be known for.
Director Daniel Chan and cinematographer Wade Muller
have made several movies together,
and I've enjoyed them for a lot of reasons.
TRIAD,
CROSS,
and YOUNG & DANGEROUS: RELOADED
were simultaneously a lot of fun to watch
as well as a lot of fun to look at.
For whatever reason, local films in the last few years
seem to think that color is a bad thing.
Y'know, if I mention films like
COLD WAR,
Z STORM,
or PROJECT GUTENBERG,
the images in your head
probably have a lot of gray and blue in them.
The far end of that spectrum of course is
THE TROUGH,
a film that put all of its color into the poster
and took it out of the film itself.
I'm really not a fan of that.
If I want to see a lot of depressing gray,
I'll look at my pubic hair.
Sorry...
WE ARE LEGENDS, like Daniel Chan and Wade Muller's
previous collaborations, is wonderfully colorful.
Part of my admiration for it
is probably just simple nostalgia:
the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema was
riotously... colorful,
and seeing that tradition carried on,
especially on a big screen, just makes me happy.
But Chan and Muller's movies are also very Hong Kong
in their stories and their presentations.
WE ARE LEGENDS tells the story of
two orphaned brothers,
played by Lam Yiu Sing and Edward Ma.
Eric Kot Man Fai and Yuen Qiu
are their surrogate parents,
and they raised these two boys into fighters,
both literal and figurative.
Jack is a fighter just entering the professional realm,
and he's got a bit of an ego problem:
Rabbit likes to make extra money fighting underground.
I mean fighting unofficially, not literally, like fighting,
y'know, in basements and... no.
And, y'know what, that's really
all the story you're gonna hear from me,
because I want you to see this movie yourself.
Here's a few reasons why:
WE ARE LEGENDS is an ambitious film.
I'm not sure that this film is gonna
catch on with the local audience, even though it should.
What I mean is that, okay,
in a lot of ways it is a very Hong Kong movie.
Although it's a film about MMA,
it's really a very classic martial arts story
like we've seen a lot of times before.
And it's told with an economy of narrative that's
probably gonna be familiar to a lot of you,
but more on that later.
Oh, and since I said moron...
Now, like I already said,
WE ARE LEGENDS has a classic Hong Kong look to it.
It also has a sequence featuring Wiyona Yeung that
makes no narrative contribution whatsoever to the story,
but it's still just a perfect Hong Kong movie moment.
Let's just say that it's irrefutable proof that Daniel Chan
used to work for Wong Jing.
Speaking of which,
the movie also has some very typical tonal shifts
that some people might find a little jarring,
but the local audience definitely enjoys.
Besides, they're done well enough that...
y'know, you don't hear the clutch grinding,
so who cares?
As I said at the beginning of this review,
I appear in this film as a ring announcer.
I speak English to the crowd,
and then I speak English to the fighters,
and then the fighters respond in Chinese...
for no reason whatsoever.
But even as we shot that scene, we were all laughing.
It's a very local kind of joke,
and I was just grateful to be a part of it.
Kind of like being the world's biggest mic stand.
That's intentional,
and I hope you think it's as funny as I do.
WE ARE LEGENDS is worth seeing because it's
the kind of movie where everybody's hard work is
really self evident.
The main cast surprised everybody in the production
when they transformed themselves into people that are
visually convincing as being fighters,
because neither of those young men was in
that sort of shape
and they apparently got into it real quickly.
After early screenings of the film,
people have apparently been asking Daniel Chan
which gym Wiyona Yeung teaches martial arts at,
because they want to, y'know, study under her.
That's not a euphemism.
And the thing is that she doesn't really do martial arts
in real life, she just did it in that movie, but obviously
her preparation and her performance in the film
are convincing enough that
people think she does it all the time.
Now stuntman Jason Li was always in great shape,
but it's nice to see him get an opportunity here to play,
y'know, an actual role that has a character arc
and some lines and stuff,
and so that was a lot of fun to watch.
Daniel Chan, in addition to writing, directing,
and editing the film, also operated a camera.
So moving from the physical to the intellectual...
the level of detail in this movie
was really impressive to me,
because, quite honestly, I don't get to see it that often.
Now I was never a huge fight fan growing up,
but even I could recognize all the numerous
nods to boxing and to boxing movies.
Anybody who knows anything about boxing movies
is gonna get the big one,
and it's not the obvious one.
And anybody who knows anything about
boxing as a sport is gonna recognize a lot of names
and places and events that you see
in posters or on t-shirts, and for me it showed both
a commitment to the movie
as well as the love that a lot of people
involved in the making of it have for martial arts.
Yes, boxing is a martial art.
So, for me it was a lot of fun to see these details,
because I kind of could register them
and understand what they were talking about,
or referencing, as it were.
For example, there's an homage to a heavyweight boxer
that you might not get,
but even if you don't get it,
it's referencing something really funny,
so even without knowing it's a reference
it's still funny, so don't worry about it.
Mixed Martial Arts is still, relatively speaking,
kind of a small thing in Hong Kong,
and I appreciated that WE ARE LEGENDS
doesn't try to tell a bigger story than it should.
This isn't a movie about sports as much as it's about
people who do a sport
and what sports means in their lives,
and I have to say the thing I appreciated most about
WE ARE LEGENDS is that it's not in a hurry.
Remember when I said "more on that later"?
Well, yeah, WE ARE LEGENDS does tell
some parts of the story very quickly.
But it also takes the time more than once
to let the audience sit
and watch people have a conversation,
and I just really enjoyed and appreciated that.
Then again, that goes for the whole film.
If the local audience doesn't appreciate
WE ARE LEGENDS, that's their loss.
The rest of us will be able to recognize it.
It's nice to see a movie this ambitious, that's also really
about something that people involved in the production
obviously really care very strongly about,
and it's also a movie where people
very obviously work their asses off to make it.
That probably is the biggest reason
the film definitely deserves our support,
but it's by no means the only one.
I think everybody involved did a wonderful job,
and like I say they deserve our support.
In fact, director Daniel Chan
personally gave me the stills that are used in this review.
Please go and see this movie; see it on a big screen.
Do you have any idea how fat I look on a cinema screen?
But of course, do it legally. D
Don't download it and then say you loved watching it
'cause you stole it and I'm not going to tolerate that,
I don't care what you say, okay?
People spend money to make movies.
People should spend money to watch movies.
That's just how it works.
I don't spend a lot of money to make these videos,
but I spend a lot of time, and time is money.
Jack Burton told us that thirty-some years ago.
And so if you think of it in those terms,
I do spend a significant amount of time on these videos.
If you wanted to make me feel like
my time was worth something,
I'm not gonna stop you.
If you enjoyed this review please let me know,
if you didn't, let me know.
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Thank you for watching, I'll see you again soon.