Wolf Warrior 2 (2017)

Wolf Warrior 2 is very much the sort of film where you'll take away from it what you bring to it, which is probably why it's taken me so long to actually watch it - I knew it would rub me the wrong way.

Its flaws are easy to enumerate - cliché, stereotype, total lack of subtlety, overtly nationalistic and propagandistic, surprisingly bad CGI... any or all of these could fatally undermine the film for some viewers. However, if you accept that all those things are a given, there's a layer on which the film definitely works. That layer is mostly composed of Wu Jing - charismatic, athletic and fully committed as star and director. He embodies a particular heroic archetype so thoroughly it's no wonder he has become a national treasure.

It's quite odd seeing this transformation of Wu Jing into a national icon, having followed his career since 1996's Tai Chi II pitched him as the heir to Jet Li's wu shu crown (without much immediate success). I guess there's a bit of "Hey, he's mine - you can't have him!", which is obviously objectively not the case.

Of course, the film is an action treat - packed with battles on a range of scales, from frantic gun battles to martial arts showdowns to an overly long tank duel, Wu Jing and his team pull out all the stops. The poor CGI hampers the larger scale action, but Wu's formidable physical abilities shine when things get up close and personal.

I was a bit troubled by the increasing militarism and overt propaganda in Chinese cinema in the late 2010's, but the way the world has been lately it's starting to look like it was just good foresight. The chances of global erupting are higher now than in decades, and it's probably smart to prepare the public for that possibility.