Heroes of the East

This Shaw Bros. classic starts out very promising. It’s basically a romantic comedy about a young entitled Chinese man (played by a jarringly haired Gordon Liu) who has an arranged marriage with a beautiful Japanese bride. All is going well until she is revealed to be a Japanese martial arts master. What follows is a series of mishaps where her “heavy” Karate style ends up trashing the household and embarrassing her husband. Now, here’s where even a hack screenwriter would develop a story where husband and wife must face an external force and learn to understand the other’s culture to defeat the enemy. Instead, the remaining two-thirds of the movie are a Chinese nationalistic power fantasy in which every Japanese fighting style is immediately taken down by the superior Chinese Kung-Fu techniques. There is no hero’s journey to speak of. Gordon Liu just grinds through opponent after opponent without any learning or development. So much lost potential. The only redeeming part of the ending is seeing some early cinematic ninja action.