The Boxer Rebellion (4 Stars)

The title of this film is misleading. The action takes place during and immediately after the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901, but it's not an attempt to tell the story of the rebellion itself. It's about three young men who join the Boxers, but are disillusioned and leave the Boxers before the rebellion starts, and then continue the fight after the rebellion fails.

These are the three brothers. I apologise for not being able to tell you their names. In conversation they call each other Big Brother, Second Brother and Third Brother, from left to right in the picture. All three are skilled martial artists. They hear about a religious sect in Peking led by a man called Li Chung, which he calls the Boxers. He promises his followers that they will be invulnerable to guns. Excited by this promise they join the sect, but they discover that it's a lie. Li Chung is only telling them bullets won't hurt them so that they'll be braver in battle.

The brothers leave the Boxers, who now have 50,000 members, but they watch closely when the rebellion starts. The first action of the Boxers is to attack a Japanese camp, and they're slaughtered when they run unarmed into machine gun fire. The three brothers lead a better planned second attack, intending to steal a machine gun, but even though they kill a large number of Japanese soldiers they fail. The brothers survive, but most of the Redshirts are killed.

Li Chung's next step is to cleanse the city. Foreigners in the city (mostly Japanese and British) are killed, but they also attack any Chinese they consider to be traitors. This includes banks where foreigners have deposited money, making the Boxers very rich.

At this point I was becoming surprised. This is a Chinese film, made in 1976, but it paints the rebels in a very negative light, just as bad as the foreign devils. There's very little Chinese patriotism in the film.

The foreigners send an army made up of soldiers from eight countries: American, Austrian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian, led by the German General Waldersee. Their combined forces overwhelm the Boxers, and there are mass executions in the street. It doesn't stop there. General Waldersee orders that the whole population of Peking should be executed for supporting the Boxers. The only ones who can stand up to the invading forces are the three brothers.

Any sense of realism the film might have had dissipates in the last 45 minutes of the film. The brothers rush into battle, usually one at a time, defeating 20, 30 or more soldiers at a time. I don't say that as a criticism. This isn't meant to be a documentary film. One of the main tropes of martial arts films is that a single fighter can defeat a large group of opponents.

Do you recognise the Third Brother? It's Alexander Fu Sheng, who was only 21 at the time, but already Hong Kong's biggest martial arts star. He was an exceptionally talented fighter, but he was also an outstanding comedian. He was Jackie Chan before there was a Jackie Chan. His fights in the last half hour of the film are full of comical stunts. It's tragic that he died at the age of 28.

When the film was shown in British and American cinemas in the 1970's, it had a running time of 73 minutes. The Blu-ray that I watched today is the first English subtitled release of the uncut Hong Kong version, 143 minutes. Wow! That means that almost half of the footage was cut from the international version. That must have totally ruined the film.