Maginificent Warriors: Nicknamed Michelle Yeoh's Version of Indiana Jones

Michelle Yeoh, Hwang-Jang Lee, Lo Meng, etc. - this movie has a great cast for how schlocky it feels. Most of the jokes aren’t laugh out loud, and the group fights are excessive compared to the one-on-one combat scenes, yet it's funny and action-packed nonetheless. Magnificent Warriors definitely has a ‘been done before’ feel to it, but it holds up pretty well for a low-budget 80s martial arts movie, and it does manage to muster up the comfort that we Kung-Fu cinema fiends go after.

The time period is the 1930s during the Sino-Japanese war; the place is a small town somewhere in mainland China. Snooping Chinese secret agents (Michelle Yeoh and Yee Tung-Sing) discover that the town’s Japanese occupiers are planning to convert the podunk place into a weapons manufacturing site, and outrage ensues. The agents, the inept sidekicks they meet along the way (Richard Ng and Lau Chin-Dai) and the citizens of said small town aim to take back what’s theirs from the most classic Kung-Fu villains of all: colonizers, specific here to the Japanese variety.

Choreography is a-okay. Nothing remarkable or genre breaking, but the shots are well paced and aren’t too close or angular. It’s definitely on par for the decade. Kung Fu styles are not too specific with the general cast, though Yeoh shows off her Wing Chun skills as that’s what she’s known for.

There’s alright action, a few laughs; there’s some romance and there’s Chinese patriotism that invigorated me, even as a watcher who wasn’t Chinese nor a nationalist for the country. It doesn’t break the mold and it really is an average watch compared to some of Yeoh's real heavy hitters and other classics of the era.