See the best scene in Donnie Yen's Legend of the Fist: the Return of Chen Zhen

This doozie of an opening occurs about five minutes or so into the prologue of this Friday's limited release, Legend of the Fist. It's a Donnie Yen action vehicle, arguably operating as a sequel to Bruce Lee's Fists of Fury. When Yen isn't fighting people, the picture is pretty dull, although Andrew Lau deserves credit for going full-on nationalistic in this tale of 1920s-China being subjugated by the Japanese between the two World Wars. The story is pretty basic (Donnie Yen returns from war and dons the alias of a wealthy playboy and becomes a vigilante by night), but the telling isn't particularly inspiring. When Yen isn't kicking righteous ass (which isn't as often as you'd think) or we aren't being treated to hilariously violent montages of public officials being murdered, the film slows to a crawl. To be fair, the closing fight scene (where Yen takes on an entire dojo of baddies by himself) is pretty spectacular, but this opening bit is the best reason to see the picture. And since Well Go USA and/or Variance Films saw fit to put this sequence up online just days before the limited theatrical release, and Film School Rejects was nice enough to embed it. So they have saved you the trip to the theater. Legend of the Fist is not a terrible film. Yen is potent in a way that the less physically imposing Jet Li or the more comedic Jackie Chan never was (even Chan knew his better, as he let Yen kick his ass in the terrific Shanghai Knights back in 2003) and the production values are stylish. But it fails the primary test of a solid martial arts film: am I entertained when the fists and feet are not flying? Alas, the answer in this case is no.

Grade: C+