#tiger cage

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Batman's son aka Robin aka Damian Wayne pulling off the crisp vertical kick made famous by the likes of Donnie Yen and Jet Li. Pics from Super Sons # 13 and Tiger Cage.

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Cynthia Khan - Tiger Cage 2 (1990)

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Cheung Kwok Leung - Tiger Cage III (1991)

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Donnie Yen, Michael Woods - Tiger Cage 2 (1990)

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Donnie Yen, John Salvitti - Tiger Cage 2 (1990)

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In a tiger cage eating bread and gabbing. do you see me

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Donnie Yen tribute - War of Change

I’m back to my old tribute ways

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Movie Review | Tiger Cage (Yuen, 1988)

If you picked up the 88 Films box set of the Tiger Cage trilogy, saw the picture of Donnie Yen holding the sword on the cover and assumed that this first movie delivered on that front, I must regretfully report that it does not. If you saw the picture and assumed that he was at least the lead, I must regretfully report that he is not. If you saw the cover and at the very least hoped that he got to do cool shit, I must...what’s the opposite of regretfully? I must cheerfully report that he does indeed get to do lots of cool shit, starting from his introduction, jumping in through a window, shattering the glass with his body, charging in guns blazing into a drug bust turned firefight. And that’s not all. He gets to do plenty of cool shit throughout the movie, including a two-on-one fight where he practically levitates as he bounces his kicks off his opponents. And there’s more, but that would be getting into spoiler territory. What’s important is that the movie delivers on cool shit.

This is a police corruption actioner, where the betrayals sting all the more because the movie establishes the rapport between the characters at the beginning. After that initial drug bust, where a lot of paunchy mustachioed bad guys get shot to pieces but one escapes, we have the characters celebrating their success as well as the impending wedding of two members of the unit. This scene has a lot of “one day before retirement and here’s a picture of my kids and the boat I’m gonna be spending my time on” energy, so it’s no surprise that the guy who escaped guns down the fiance with an especially threatening looking shotgun. (We first see the guy prep and pose with the weapon framed against red lighting, like a weapon forged in the fires of hell.) As the other cops vow to avenge his death, we get what can only be described as a police brutality montage (police brutality is common in Hong Kong action movies, but this is the first time I’ve seen it montaged through). And then more paunchy mustachioed bad guys, and not so paunchy, not so mustachioed bad guys, and the revelation that members of the police force might in fact be selling drugs to some eeeeeeeeeevvvvviiiiiiiiilllllll foreigners (literally three people hanging around the docks, one of whom wears a nice hat). This thing might go straight to the top. Something something handover anxiety, something something distrust in institutions, I’ll leave the political analysis to somebody smarter than myself. (If there’s one thing I’ll quibble about, it’s that an attempted rape scene feels a bit of a miscalculation, bit too gleefully evil for a character who should be more businesslike. But like the time in high school basketball when a player covering me got a little too hands on, the attempt is squashed with a knee to the balls, so things work out in the end.)

What I can analyze is how much the movie kicks ass. My experience with Yuen Woo-Ping’s work as a director and fight choreographer has been through comedic star vehicles like Drunken Master and The Magnificent Butcher, appreciative Hollywood efforts like the Matrix and Kill Bill movies, and of course Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And I’ll take a moment to give a shout out to Game of Death II, arguably the best Bruceploitation movie, largely thanks to the  formidable fight scenes. Across those movies there’s a good amount of range in the exact qualities of the choreography in each of those, but the intricacy and grace I’d associated with his work is downplayed here in favour of an atmosphere of brutality. This is heavy on gunplay, but it’s meted out in relentless bursts, lacking the balletic qualities of John Woo’s work. Every squib has a thunderous impact, every bone crunch deeply felt, the brain matter exploding out of a character’s head a manifestation of the raw emotion of the scene. Excess is the name of the game, right down to the exclamatory final moments.