He kills one baddie with a bullet – without using a gun. He does it all: fighting with hands, feet, sticks, poles, umbrellas. He's got gravitas as an actor, but when he's in action, he really takes some beating. Earthbound reality is left far behind.Īnd Li is simply incredible. The wire-assisted fight scenes – choreographed by Yuen Wo-ping, inevitably – are ingeniously staged. Director Tsui Hark, schooled in both the US and Hong Kong, fills the screen with movement and energy. Its British and American baddies are cartoonishly demonised, and the plot is often convoluted to the point of impenetrability, admittedly, but what this film chiefly provides is dazzling, colourful, kinetic, epic, pre-CGI spectacle. Transposed to 1990s Hong Kong, with the handover from British to Chinese sovereignty on the horizon, this story of a Chinese rebel fighting oppressive colonialist powers had extra resonance. Jackie Chan played him in Drunken Master, and a long-running Wong Fei-hung film series during the 1950s and 60s gave roles to the fathers of Bruce Lee and Yuen Wo-ping, among many others. Like Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood, he'd been portrayed many times before. Its subject was already well known to local audiences: Wong Fei-hung was a real person: a turn-of-the-century martial arts master and healer who's become something of a folk hero. The film that kick-started Hong Kong cinema's kung-fu renaissance and launched Jet Li towards a future of substandard western action movies. ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA, (aka WONG FEI HUNG), from left: Jet LI as WONG Fei-hung, Rosamund KWAN, 1991 Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/REX 10. Mandatory Credit: Photo by Courtesy Everett Collection/REX (2067892a)

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