My TIFF slate got off to a bit of a rough start with LEGEND OF THE FIST, although I’ll openly admit that as a newbie to Andrew Lau’s films I might not have “got it”.

Directed by the aforementioned Lau (INFERNAL AFFAIRS), LEGEND OF THE FIST features the character of Zhen Chen – a role first made famous by Bruce Lee in FIST OF FURY.

The film starts out amazingly, opening with a scene involving the image above where a man from a WWI Chinese labour corp single-handedly takes out a platoon of Germans. I guess it goes to show that if allied soldiers put down their rifles and mortars and took on the enemy using martial arts, we could have solved things a whole lot quicker.

Unfortunately, it’s mostly downhill from there as the film abandons all sense of pacing and bumper-cars its way through WWII era Japanese/Chinese tensions in Shanghai. It borrows from sources that range from CASABLANCA to SUPERMAN, and scatters some intense incomprehensible melodrama around some truly wild action.

The film features a pretty badass hero played by Donnie Yen, even if I wasn’t always entirely sure of what he was trying to achieve. Wish I could say the same for his counterpart, who is not nearly that interesting and seems one fluffy white cat away from being a James Bond villain.

LEGEND OF THE FIST gave me glimpses of great ideas, especially the aforementioned WWI sequence and a nifty looking jazz club set. Too bad the film never seems to build any sort of momentum, instead yanking the audience all over the spectrum. There are a lot of fun little bits to this film, but ultimately it was a letdown.

LEGEND OF THE FIST: THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHEN plays TIFF twice more. Once on Friday 9/10 at 12pm, and finally on Saturday 9/18 at 9am. It will be released in North American theatres in 2011.