'Grandmaster': An epic cut down to size

By GARY THOMPSON, Daily News Staff Writer

Posted on August 30, 2013 in The Philly Daily News

THE AD CAMPAIGN for "The Grandmaster" features a blurb from Martin Scorsese praising the movie for being "arranged with elegance." Did he get the CliffsNotes? I had a much harder time with the arrangement of Wong Kar Wai's new kung fu, World War II (former) epic. The movie I saw looked like it had been made from a script dropped into a blender, made into a puree for quick consumption.

Of course, the version I saw ran 109 minutes - 20 minutes shorter than the version available in China, and reportedly three hours shorter than the director's original cut. The subtitled U.S. version has the telltale fingerprints of Harvey Weinstein (massive voice-over explainers), who no doubt recruited Scorsese for the endorsement, and even convinced Wong Kar Wai to write an op-ed (presumably in the presence of Luca Brasi) praising the Weinstein Co.'s handling of the movie.

I'll take the esteemed director at his word, but 109 minutes is not a lot of time to tell the sprawling wartime story of invasion, collaboration and resistance, overlaid with a tragic love story and themes of Chinese national unity. What you do see is unmistakably the work of the renowned visual stylist, considered by many to be unsurpassed in that category.

And he's working here with wonderful leads - Tony Leung as legendary kung-fu master Ip Man (mentor to Bruce Lee), whose ability to fuse all fighting styles makes for some hypnotic action scenes, and also positions him as a metaphor for China's unified future. Ziyi Zhang plays his adversary and equal, and they have a powerful attraction thwarted by circumstance and Chinese notions of honor that can seem strange to the Western mind (though try telling that to Rick Blaine). What you do get to see is certainly striking, but there are jarring transitions, obvious missing sections and key characters who get lost along the way. Wong Kar Wai's movies deserve to be seen in theaters, but this is one instance wherein you might be better off waiting for a more expansive and coherent DVD.

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