Word: yuen
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...Hong Kong movies, melodrama is never mellow, and Yuen is ever eager to place women in apalling jeopardy. DoDo Cheng gets kicked into barbed wire in the 1988 Tiger Cage. An even snazzier thriller, the 1989 In the Line of Duty 4, has plucky Cynthia Kahn battle a predator on the top of, on the side of and nearly under a speeding ambulance; later she takes on two thugs as the hero's mom hangs trussed from a 12-m rope next to an electrified fence...
...asking: Who thinks this stuff up? Answer: showmen who will do anything for a scream or a giggle. (Yuen also loves the comic possibilities of physical blemishes, like warts and buck teeth.) But Yuen is only observing the cardinal rule in Hong Kong: these are moving pictures. And an action choreographer is bound to keep the action coming, at whatever cost to logic or taste...
Since this action choreographer is not only a director but an actor, Yuen has shown he can take punishment as well as dish it out. It's a family affair: as a boy he appeared with his father in the old Wong Fei-hung dramas. The brothers have often collaborated as actors and stunt coordinators, billed as the Yuen Clan. In The Miracle Fighters, a delirious carnival of a film that plays like a ber-Cirque du Soleil, Yat-choh is the young hero, Cheung-yan a cranky lady wizard, Sunny the nasty Sorcerer Bat and Brandy a clown-face...
Perhaps that prepared him for the tug of wills on the Crouching Tiger set. Lee is as stubborn as he is gentle, adamant about putting on film the beautiful stunts he had dreamed of since childhood. Yuen had to play the stern adult. "Ang would say he didn't want to shoot things Wo-ping's way because it was an Ang Lee movie," Chow recalls. "But his ideas couldn't be worked out. Finally, he'd go to Wo-ping and say, 'Master, I'm wrong. Let's do it your way.'" At least Lee convinced Yuen...
...result is a superb romantic clash?a battle between a wise god and a defiant young goddess. Just like the fruitful friction between Yuen and his demanding director. Out of it came artistry, and another triumph for Yuen Wo-ping, the martial master...