I picked this up from a flea market for three reasons: 1. Asian movies aren't the most commond find around here, 2. it was cheap, and 3. IT'S MARTIAL ARTS, MAN!!

The box description led me to expect something scary brutal, like heads flying in the ring... but the movie was actually quite tame. Especially in the beginning there's a lot of humour. I suppose that's a tradition in Chinese kung fu movies, that there is fighting but also funny moments. Towards the end the movie gets a little more intense because there's more fighting. The thing I liked the most was that the fighting scenes were very nicely shot, with a lot of cool camera angles. The kind of material that would be perfect in a music video!

As a whole the film seemed a bit unmemorable to me. Nothing really special about it. If you like movies with boxing or other fighting sport in the ring, then you will probably enjoy it to some extent. But if you miss it, you won't miss really that much.

Xanda is the story of Qiang (Weilin Sang), a countryside kung fu master who moves to a big city to pursue his dreams. There he gets introduced to Xanda, or Sanda as it is more popularly known, a modern Chinese fighting style developed in the early 1900s. And of course he gets pulled in and eventually gets a shot at the crown title match.

What this film lacks is a red thread running throughout it all. Its story is hard to follow and is generally all over the place. At first we don't even know which characters are alive and which are not because the film keeps jumping back and forth in time so much. Eventually we figure out that this character is supposed to be dead and because of that this character acts the way they do, but it's much too little much too late.

It's also very... Rocky Balboa -ish. Like, this whole film is basically Rocky I in modern China. It's not quite beat for beat, but it's uncomfortably close. Sure, the Rocky film are the quintessential boxing films, but you still can't copy them quite this blatantly and not expect to be called out on it.

All that being said, this film had its moments, mostly whenever it didn't try to be a martial arts sports film.

It's no secret that Tsui Hark has been down on his luck lately, and his trip to Hollywood seems to have done his career a lot of harm, though it did apparently result in the great TIME AND TIDE, so it wasn't all bad. However, T&T flopped at the box office, as did his next film LEGEND OF ZU... and his next (BLACK MASK 2)... and the one after that (ERA OF VAMPIRES). So, he's been finding it a bit hard to get financing his films lately, and for his latest film XANDA he seems to have partnered with mainland company Shenzhen Film Studio, for a film shot in Mainland China about the martial art XANDA (or SAN DA if you prefer). It should be noted that Tsui is only credited as producer with Marco Mak taking director credit - but with Tsui Hark, the line between producer and director can be a very thin one.

However, whether you choose to look at it as a Tsui Hark film OR a Marco Mak film, XANDA must surely be a new career lowpoint. The film disappeared from the HK box office without a trace, and unfortunately I have to conclude that this was with good reason. The film gets off to an ok start as we see a young former kung fu champion to move Shenzhen to earn enough money to buy a car and see a bit more of the world. However, this plan goes astray when his friend gets injured in a fight and he decides to enter a XANDA competition to get money for his medical bills. He figures (we assume) that because he was a kung fu champ as a kid, he should be able to learn SAN DA in a few weeks and enter his first tournament. Rather implausibly he does enter the tournament (despite having had like 1 days XANDA training) and gets his ass kicked. He quits XANDA, fannies around with a girl who for reasons never explained falls for him and then for reasons I've blacked out decides to take up XANDA again, and somehow ends up fighting the world champion in what seems to be his second ever tournament fight (perhaps something got lost in the editing room). Did I mention that the champion is going out with his girlfriend's sister? Well, it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the plot or thematic relevance, so I don't know why they did either...

That's the plot, in a nutshell. And it really doesn't get any deeper than that (though it layers the cheese and cliche on thick). It's virtually incoherent, embarrassingly shallow and tacky and really not at all interesting.

BUT, it's a martial arts tournament film, so who needs a plot? Well, there might be some justification in that viewpoint (I said *some*) if the fights were entertaining to watch, but they really aren't. There's a few moments where the lead shows off some great kung fu forms, but as the film tells us, XANDA is about combat, not looking good - and hence the XANDA fights really aren't that exciting to watch. Once you've seen your 100th slomo shot of somebody getting hit in the face and spraying water/sweat/saliva or whatever there really isn't much point seeing more - and I'm sure we all saw our 100th such shot well before we even heard of XANDA. I guess Marco Mak (or Tsui Hark) realised in the editing room that a combat-oriented martial art isn't that cinematic, and hence came up with the idea of showing all the fights in cheesy Rocky-style montages, with multiple shots overlaid, including scenes of training or his girlfriend or his childhood or his pet dog or whatever, so you barely get to see the fights anyway. Even when they're not mixed with 13 other shots, the camera is in too tight and the editing too fast to appreciate much of what's happening. Basically it's a blow-out.

There *might* have been a decent film in here if they'd cut out all the stupid plot and just had a pure XANDA tournament film, and actually showed the fights in whole and with clear camerawork editing. The fighters do have some impressive skills (you can occasionally tell from the shots), and the fights look like they were pretty full-contact. It *might* have been quite enjoyable to watch. But in its current form, it really isn't.

Though I did manage to make it to the end without fast forwarding, falling asleep or dying - so it's perhaps not *completely* worthless...

Tsui Hark, you really need to get your act together and give us and yourself a hit film again...