Some of you may or may not know this, but I am a huge fan of martial arts movies. One of my biggest movie idols (besides obviously Bruce Lee) is Donnie Yen. He's had some supportive roles in a few American movies (like Blade 2 and Shanghai Knights), but he's a much bigger action movie star in Hong Kong. One of my favorite movies that put me on to Donnie was Iron Monkey, and ever since then I have followed him through three Ip Man movies, Flash Point, Dragon Tiger Gate, and Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, to name a few.
Even though he has cult status in the States, Donnie is set to release his latest film Dragon (Wu Xia) in select US theaters (and VOD). Dragon follows more of the formula he's been following as of late, focusing on big budget period action films than more modern-day fare. Yen plays Liu Jin-Xi, a simple villager whose quiet family life is disrupted when two gangsters show up and force him to reveal his martial arts prowess. Before things can settle back down to normal, a detective named Xu Bai-ju (Takeshi Kaneshiro from House of the Flying Daggers) shows up to investigate the death of the gangsters and threatens to uncover Liu's dark criminal past.
Check out a clip from the film, as well as one of my favorite fight scenes from Donnie with Colin Chou (The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions), and a few fight scenes from Ip Man below. To check out an exclusive interview with Donnie at the New York Asian Film Festival where he talks about his latest film, turning down a role in Expendables 2 and the art of choreographing a fight scene, check it out at the following link
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