The Master is the very first collaboration between director Tsui Hark and actor Jet Li Lian-Jie, about a year before the famous Once upon a time in China. But there's nothing of this last movie in The Master. As a matter of fact, it seems that it was even conceived as the contrary of any Tsui Hark or Jet Li project : no ambition, no delivered message, no aesthetism… We keep expecting during this movie something that will never come…

The story is quite simple : Jie (Jet Li) comes to the US to visit his Master but has to face the villains who constantly persecute him and destroy his shop. Our hero gets robbed by a group of delinquants as soon as he arrives in town, and after a run and a fight, they start to worship and follow him : they now desperately want to have him as their master… In the end, he'll have to fight the persecutors of his Master, lead by the hostile headmaster of an American Martial Arts school…

The tone of the movie is obviously light, and often funny. Our hero does not speak English : he communicates through signs with his "disciples" who look like dumbs. The music remains us of American TV series of the late 70's, and is surprinsingly cheap for a Tsui Hark movie of the late 80's… Once we have admitted that we'll only have to understand what's going on screen, without searching for more, we are ready to enjoy this simple and nice movie where American people hardly know how to speak English properly, where a young Chinese man arrested by the police finally heals the whole department from their gastric problems thanks to his knowledge of Chinese medicine… this scene is particularly funny. Is it a reference to Wong Fei-Hung's medicine skills?…

The Master was so bad to Tsui Hark's eyes that it was only released in 1992 after the Once upon a time in China series' success : renamed Wong Fei-Hung 92 on this occasion, as a modern version of the Wong Fei Hung series, it is in fact very far from the legend. Though Yuen Wah, who plays our hero's master, owns a shop called Po Chi Lam, there are no real references to Wong Fei-Hung himself… much more to Bruce Lee's Way of the Dragon, when the bad guys come to the shop to attack again Jie and his new disciples.

In the end, what's the interest of the movie? The fights are not bad. There are some cool street fights between Jet Li and the Americans : the choreography is far from remarkable, but still correct. The last fight with the American headmaster is more interesting : quite violent and more inventive, especially when Jet Li jams his foot and is obliged to fight with one leg… it's a shame that the end of this confrontation turns so weak. A fake explosion is not generous enough to let us forget the dull of the whole movie. And to erase the bad impression led by the horrible performance of the "bad guy"… it is obvious this man and Jet Li were not meant to meet each other. Their styles do never match to create some exciting tension, and the gap between their acting skills is too huge not to disturb us.

In this insipid movie, though Tsui Hark's directing is quite unrecognizable - as it is so impersonal - Jet Li tries as far as possible to keep the movie on an acceptable level. And his performance, with Yuen Wah's is the only one to notice here. He's as charming as usual, playing the innocent foreigner in a hostile world and offering us the funniest sequences of the movie : the one in the police department of course, but also the one where he tries to learn how to drive with Crystal Kwok, which remains a delight. His quickness and fluidity in the fights focus our attention enough to hide us temporarily the lack of interest of the whole story…

The Master has certainly the particularity of being the worse of Tsui Hark subtly combined with the worse of Jet Li… as they are both capable of the best, their worse is nothing to be afraid of : they just gave us a forgettable movie which is not unpleasant to watch…

By CAROLINE