Stunt superstar

The gravity-defying stunts in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001) are one of the wuxia genre’s biggest influences, but there are plenty. These frenetic martial arts movies helped establish Eastern cinema, thrilled Western audiences and influenced filmmakers across the globe. Based on ancient tales of assassins, the modern martial arts movie can be traced back 2,000 years through Chinese history to early youxia tales from 300–200 BC. Youxia literally translates to “wandering vigilante”, and that element of the genre has remained intact ever since, though with a number of evolving adjustments. In the Tang Dynasty (618–907), these stories rose in popularity and solidified the trope of the loner warrior. By 1966, these stories made it onto celluloid, laying the foundation for stories and visual styles that have remained influential ever since.

One of the most successful, both commercially and critically, of these films was Come Drink WIth Me (1966). This Hong Kong action film featured many of the characteristics of the wuxia tale and starred a woman as the action hero. Cheng Pei-pei stars as Golden Swallow, a yougn woman who has to save her brother from a kidnapping. Dressing as a man, she infiltrates the gang of bandits and fights an overwhelming number of enemies. In the scene we show in Goddess, Golden Swallow dispatches a room full of trained killers, a scenario that features in Yu Ying’s (Angela Mao) battle against the Black Bear Gang in Hapkido (1975), the Bride’s (Uma Thurman) fight against the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Violet Song’s (Mila Jovavich) dispatching of the white-glad security guards in Ultraviolet (2006). The latter, a sci-fi adventure set in the future, the filmmakers shot in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and used Hong Kong visual effects artists, reinforcing the link between Hollywood action films and the Chinese stories that inspired their visual style. According to Michael Chow, when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon received widespread acclaim and popularised the wuxia film for Western audiences, the misconception that female action stars and characters (like The Bride and VIolet Song) were a recent development in screen culture. Chow counters that, “Come Drink’s commercial success fostered a stronger popularisation of the female knight-errant figure as a standard protagonist in the wuxia genre... Since then, the warrior woman has been a consistent feature in wuxia films.”

Interestingly, Cheng Pei-pei wasn’t a formally trained martial artist, but a ballet dancer. A few decades later, Michelle Yeoh would follow the same path from stage to screen. The Oscar-winner and legendary stunt performer trained herself in martial arts after a ballet injury forced her to give up her dance career.

In Wing Chun, Yeoh plays the titular hero – a shopkeeper forced to stand up to bandits – who routinely dresses in a male disguise to avoid the attention of men. As the academic Luke White writes, the use of male attire by Wing Chun (and Golden Swallow before her) represents, “her ability to step beyond the sanctioned social roles of femininity and embrace the conventionally “masculine” powers of the warrior” but like many wuxia films, features “an array of clownish and inadequate men, who sketch out a patriarchal system of authority in crisis”.

Both Wing Chun and Come Drink with Me feature another defining element of wuxia – high-wire stunt work – which mixes high-octane martial arts with the poetry of traditional Chinese theatre. Though western audiences were, for the large part, first introduced to this fantastical choreography in scenes of rooftop acrobatics and the iconic fight between Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you can see that it goes right back to the beginning of the genre with these two films, with Wing Chun launching herself at her enemies and Golden Swallow breaking the bounds of physics in her battles. The dramatic, gravity-defying gymnastics, which often end with a martial arts-inspired stance or pose, has been transported into western films and used at moments when a girl-gang of warriors pull together to defeat their enemies, like the alleyway fight scene in Charlie’s Angels (2000) and Sucker Punch (2011), when Babydoll (Emily Browning) and her clique are dropped from a B-52 into a warzone. In the latter instance, there isn’t any wirework, rather CGI, but the aesthetic is visually similar and the women in Sucker Punch demonstrate a variety of martial arts moves and costumes inspired by Asian cinema.

After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Zhang Ziyi also performed high-flying stunts aided by wirework in House of Flying Daggers (2004). One famous scene features the blind rebel Mei (Zhang) and her companions fleeing government troops in a bamboo forest. When Mei is cornered (and in true wuxia style, outnumbered) she uses the natural environment to fight back, doing the splits between two bamboo trees and climbing through the canopy. The connection between traditional performance and lavish stunt work is also demonstrated in the film’s famous ‘echo game’ scene. When Mei is captured and challenged to the game, where players take turns hitting a drum and the other player has to match the rhythm and echo the sound, it’s staged as a performance for spectators. Mei twists and turns like a ballet dancer, using her costume to bang the drums. As the game gets harder and she becomes more frustrated, she uses the sleeves to wield a sword and attack her captor.

When Mei uses her costume sleeves to pick the sword up from her captor’s table, she’s demonstrating another trope from wuxia films popularised in Hong Kong action movies - ‘found-object’ choreography. This slapstick incorporation of objects in a scene isn’t just deadly, it’s often humorous. Like the echo game in Crouching Tiger, in Wing Chun, Michelle Yeoh’s character take part in a challenge against a man – who has just told her to go home and bear children – this time to see whoever can break a plate of tofu. Not only does she keep the tofu from him, she uses it to best him in battle, along with furniture like tables and stools. This type of environmental storytelling and choreography can be found in wuxia films like in the market scene in Ip Man: Legacy (2018) when Julia (Yan Liu) uses a folded chair to take out a room of men, and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), which recalls the action roles that made Yeoh a star and features a scene of her also using a folded chair as a weapon. In Charlie’s Angels, Dylan (Drew Barrymore) is tied to a chair after being captured. To escape, she uses the chair, a bucket and her environment to overcome a greater number of foes. Throughout the fight, she also defies gravity, employing the kind of floating martial arts moves made popular in wuxia, even sending up the genre with comedic stances like ‘King Kong palm’, which haven’t aged terribly well.

A better homage plays out in Atomic Blonde (2017). In the movie, MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) once again overcomes overwhelming odds when she takes out an army of bad guys using a rope, freezer door, pot, baton and coffee table to level the playing field. Like Yeoh, Theron performed all of her own stunts, the physical toll of the violence expressed in the scene where we see Lorraine icing her wounded, muscular body in an ice bath. The focus on Lorraine’s physicality is a challenge to the idea of female fragility, which we also see in Goddess in the bare-knuckle training scene featured in Firebite. In wuxia films, men often dismiss women’s strength and joke about how easily they’ll beat a woman, like the tofu man in Wing Chun. Other times in wuxia films, women are seen as using their smaller stature to their advantage, moving quickly to avoid blows and turn the tables.

That notion, along with the "wandering vigilante” following a code is played out in Game of Thrones. Throughout the course of the show, we’re introduced to a number of women warriors, but fan favourites Arya Stark (Maise Williams) and Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) stand out as reflecting the trope. When her father is executed, Arya Stark disguises herself as a boy to escape the Lannisters, setting off a journey that ends with her becoming a skilled assassin who saves the realm. Driven by vengeance, she becomes a master swordsperson, and travels with various companions across the lands, helping, as wuxia warriors often do, the oppressed fight injustice. On the other spectrum is Brienne of Tarth, who promises to protect Sansa and Arya Stark and spends much of the show fighting to uphold her word. Like Arya (and Wing Chun and Mei), she is often ridiculed and underestimated due to her gender and appearance. In the scene featured in Goddess, Arya uses her stature and training to evade Brienne’s sword swings, proving that with the proper training and skill, size is irrelevant.

Though Game of Thrones is set in a fantasy world with dragons and magic, it’s analogous with medieval times. Ancient settings and sorcery are also a hallmark of wuxia films, which often take place during the historical dynasties when they first appeared in poems and literature, like House of Flying Daggers, which is set in the Tang dynasty. The historical epic style is also featured in Indian action films like Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi (2019), a retelling of an Indian queen’s battle against colonial British forces. The training and battle scenes in Goddess from this film follow the grandeur of similar, highly choreographed action sequences from wuxia films.

Wuxia’s cross-cultural pollination encouraged greater diversity of cinematic styles and storytelling in both the East and West.

Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi (2019)
Essel Vision Productions Ltd., Zee Studios

House of Flying Daggers (2004)
Elite Group, Sony Pictures

Ultraviolet (2006)
Sony Pictures Entertainment

Atomic Blonde (2017)
Focus Features

Firebite (2021–)
S1, E2 (2021)
AMC

Sucker Punch (2011)
Warner Bros.

Charlie's Angels (2000)
Sony Pictures Entertainment

Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)
Paramount Global

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Sony Pictures

Hapkido (1972)
Orange Sky Golden Harvest

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
A24 Distribution LLC

Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (2018)
Mandarin Motion Pictures

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003)
Paramount Pictures

Cutthroat Island (1995)
Lionsgate

The Last Legion (2007)
Delta (Last Legion) Ltd

Wing Chun (1994)
Sil-Metropole Organisation Ltd., Wo Ping Films Company

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
MGM

Wednesday (2022–)
S1, E1 (2022)
Netflix, MGM Television

Come Drink With Me (1966)
Shaw Brothers, Celestial Pictures

Game of Thrones (2011–2019)
S7, E4 (2017)
HBO

The Wheel of Time (2021–)
S1, E1 (2021)
Sony Pictures Television, Amazon Studios

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Paramount Pictures

Lady Snowblood (1973)
Toho, Co.

The Hunger Games (2012)
Lionsgate

Salt (2010)
Columbia Pictures