People often ask where I find the movies I cover. Truth is, it’s shockingly easy to find bad movies. I get recommendations, I read articles, I use common sense (hello there, Morbius!), and sometimes I just pick a streaming service and go dumpster diving.
Peacock won my streamer roulette the other night, and I found this:
So many questions! Is Donnie Yen (Ip Man, Star Wars: Rogue One) the Iceman? What makes him so icy? His cold demeanor? Is he from Greenland? Will he offer to be our wingman anytime? Is it his iceman-ness that makes him a time traveler? Does he get thawed out in the present like Captain America or Phil Hartman’s Caveman Lawyer? Because that’s not so much time travel as being forced to wait around a really long time. Is he going to fight that helicopter with his sword? How would that work? And what does a movie that appears to be a kung fu actioner have to do with icemen or time travel?
At only 87 minutes long, I was willing to find out.
Directed Raymond Yip, 2019, 87 minutes, Rated TV-PG
Kung-fu montage
We open with about a half dozen production logos, so I guess that’s not just an American thing. Then we’re hurtling through the solar system as Donnie Yen launches into his voice over:
“Time passes. Seasons change. But what actually is time? If we can control time, traveling back and forth at will, could we change fate, re-write history?”
Okay, so we’re starting really Big Picture here with a subject that’d be right at home in a late-night dorm room conversation. I’ll bite. Prevailing scientific theories state that time travel is hypothetically possible but you can’t change the past (Exhibit A: The Grandfather Paradox). I say the exact opposite: you could absolutely change the past and muck up history… if you could travel back in time, which you can’t. Time travel always assumes things are in a fixed location, but nothing is in a fixed location. The earth rotates and orbits, so if you were standing in your old high school and used whatever magical doodad to go back to your high school days, you wouldn’t show up in your high school in time for the prom – you’d be orbiting in space. Even sling-shotting around the sun like in Star Trek IV is hinky cuz the sun is moving, too. Eat it, science!
Anyway, back to the voice over.
“The remains of some ancient civilizations show that some being did traverse spacetime and traveled to this world…”
Someone’s been watching a lot of The History Channel… We eventually settle on Donnie Yen posing dramatically on some rooftop overlooking The City.
“Some people have become time travelers. I know this because I’m one of them!”
Gasp! Title card! And then… more voice over? Ugh. I’m a reviewer, not a transcriber, so I’ll sum up: Donnie Yen was a guard for the Ming Dynasty in the 1500s. Donnie and his besties were sent to get the secrets of time travel from a holy monk, which involves some big gold contraption and a crystal and a chant to make it all work. Donnie gets to thinking that the young ‘n douche-y Emperor shouldn’t have that kind of power so he and his besties decide to make as if they didn’t find the secrets of time travel. But then the best buds betray Donnie and even take the time to frame him for murder.
The army drags Donnie out to a glacier so they have a nice dramatic setting to let him know the Emperor had Donnie’s entire home village slaughtered. Donnie hulks out and fights off the entire battalion before engaging in a snowboard-fu fight with the best buds (it looks like a great action sequence, wish we had more than the clip show version) before they’re all buried in an avalanche, freezing them til they’re discovered in the modern day.
OMIGODTHISVOICEOVERWONTEND!! Donnie wakes up in present-day Hong Kong and meets a cutie named May who teaches him about modern life, like not drinking from the toilet, that kind of thing. The best buds are there, too, and the head bud is now a police inspector somehow? Anyway, more abridged kung-fu fighting, the best buds get the crystal from Donnie, so he gets a haircut and decides he has to go back to his own time.
I clocked it at nearly 11 minutes of voice over montage. I now understand that this is the second installment in a series (something I wish I knew before picking this film), but there’s gotta be a better way to get everyone up to speed than a giant montage, right?
Unfortunately, the filmmakers appear to luuuuve montages. We get them early and often and often unnecessarily. What’s ultimately frustrating is that they don’t illuminate anything. I still have no idea who half the characters are (and I’m taking notes!) or why the best buds betrayed Donnie to being with.
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| Also, there's a Japanese General who is one of the villains. No idea what his deal is. |
Look, this film is exhausting and I’m just now getting to the actual movie. The story is an endless series of “and then, and then, and then,” but it basically boils down to Donnie and May going back to the 1500s, attempting to stop what happened in the first movie, failing, and Donnie vowing to use the last life in his video game existence to make things right. Because that worked out so well the first time. Sorry about the unannounced spoiler, but I can’t imagine anything here is making you want to see this movie.
Which is too bad, because the fight scenes a lot of fun. Yes, they lean heavily on wire-fu and manipulating the camera speed, but they’re also imaginative and often whimsical. Sadly, they’re not enough to justify sitting through the montageathon.
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