Dragon

In a village in Yunnan the paper worker Liu Jinxi accidentally kills two men who come to rob the shop. The villagers treat him as a hero. The detective who arrives is not convinced: the dead were wanted bandits and an ordinary peasant could not have overcome them. He reconstructs the scene through acupuncture points and the angles of the blows. The subject is not combat but a detective reading a body as a crime scene. The film shows the fight twice: first as it happened, then according to his reconstruction. In the second version every movement has a reason and the viewer understands that what they saw first was wrong. The form joins two genres. The forensic passages are almost scientific; the fights are shot in traditional wuxia language. The detective's own illness and his use of needles are built into the narrative. The idea at the centre is Donnie Yen's choreography. The fights rest on anatomy rather than display; the blows are planned according to where they land and the film explains this visually. Donnie Yen plays the villager, Takeshi Kaneshiro the detective and Tang Wei his wife. Peter Chan directs. Who it is for: viewers who like martial arts cinema and detective structure together. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by the late change of genre; the film returns to traditional wuxia in its finale and drops the coolness of the first half.