June 17, 2005
Batman Needs to Learn Kung Fu
Just got out of "Batman Begins". Great movie, faithful to the psycho nut case aspect of the mythos, but martial arts that just plain suck.
What, were Yuen Woo Ping or Sammo Hung busy on some other project or something?
Even George Lucas caught on to the new sophistication of the motion picture audience--since everyone has seen "Crouching Tiger" and Jet Li is finally now a mainstream movie star, he had the Jedi training for the past 3 years and learning some better moves. Hiring a wushu guy to kick things off (groan) as Darth Maul didn't hurt either.
But Batman is just a brawler, or at least Chris Nolan just directs fight scenes that way. Frank Miller's Batman got a lot of the unarmed fighting sensibility right--how does a guy--just some ordinary guy (ok, being a billionaire isn't that ordinary, but meaning no superpowers) defeat bad guys bigger and stronger than himself? Little things like strikes to arm nerve centers (dim mak, anybody?), the kind of stuff you read about in Black Belt magazine, that sort of thing.
We see Bruce Wayne training at the elite ninja academy on the side of some Himalayan mountain (so that's where Sho Kosugi has been all these years!) but don't really get a sense of his martial ability anywhere in the movie.
At least Qui-Gon (er, Liam Neeson in his role as senpai Henri Ducard) hasn't lost his touch with a sword.
Posted by jameshom at June 17, 2005 05:27 PM | TrackBack