SHAOLIN WOODEN MEN is an early Jackie Chan film that marked only his second starring role after 1976's NEW FIST OF FURY. SHAOLIN WOODEN MEN sees Jackie labouring under the control of producer Lo Wei while the film offers a plot of revenge and retribution that was done to death in '70s kung fu films. The movie kicks off with a fight scene – always good for a martial arts flick. It sees Jackie battling various monks who have been trained as animal masters. Jackie is dressed in a white suit, while the background is totally black, and there are a few candles dotted around. The fights go on for a good while, and are well choreographed – in fact they're the best fights in the film. It soon becomes clear why this scene – which has nothing to do with the rest of the movie – was added at the film's beginning; it's because there's no human fighting for the next hour.
We're soon into the cheesy titles and then a dream sequence in which we get to see the wooden men of the title. As the wooden men sequence only occupies a very small amount of screen time in the film itself, I guess the film-makers decided to put them in at the beginning as well to try and justify the title. The story finally begins for real at the Shaolin Temple, as Jackie, playing a raw recruit, starts his work as a handyman for the monks – carrying water, chopping wood. I'm afraid these scenes are as uninteresting as they sound, and seem to go on interminably before any sign of a plot shows up. A bald drunk appears for the purposes of comic relief, but he fails to make much of an impact.
One day, Jackie follows two of the monks into a cave and comes upon a prisoner who has been chained in the depths of a cave for a decade. Jackie befriends the man, bringing him food and wine, and in repayment the prisoner trains him in the martial arts – the story going that Jackie isn't actually allowed to learn Shaolin techniques from the monks for another three years. There's also a weird old woman who teaches Jackie the 'snake step' technique, which involves him climbing into an oil pit and skidding all over the place. Finally Jackie is ready to fight the wooden men for real, and the result is an action scene that can only be described as cheesy: the wooden men are cumbersome, and it's not clear how they work – the chains that are supposed to move them are useless, and it's obvious that real men are inside the wooden costumes. This scene is clearly ripped off from an earlier kung fu film called 18 BRONZEMEN, although nowhere near as effectively.
This film sees Jackie saddled in a Bruce Lee-type role – he's even got the same haircut as the late kung fu master. He's forced into doing some Bruce Lee style emoting at the film's climax, but for the rest of the film he's mute, a strong silent fighter in the Lee tradition. It's clear that Jackie was uncomfortable acting in Bruce's shadow, and his character is a bit foolish – I never did figure out why he took the ten-year vow of silence after his father was murdered. His character's habit of frantically bowing to everybody he meets is the funniest thing in the film. It's a shame SHAOLIN WOODEN MEN is so devoid of action, because a martial arts film without fighting is like butter without bread – there's no point to it. Director Chen Chi-Hwa experiments a little by skipping frames in places and overdoing the zoom technique in one scene, but it's clear throughout that Lo Wei, as producer, was calling the shots on this production, and that he was determined to produce a film in virtually the same style as a Bruce Lee movie, with Jackie standing in as a replacement for the late star.
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