Worth: $15.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Donnie Yen, Chen Yuqi, Cya Liu, Yase Liu, Yue Wu, Kara Wai
Intro:
… between the high-flying fight scenes and the compelling character drama, it works both as its own brooding entity and as a potentially interesting IP going forward.
Not content with having just one new action classic under his belt this year as part of John Wick: Chapter Four, Donnie Yen’s latest directorial effort has him setting his sights on a second.
Adapted from the classic wuxia text Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (which also served as the foundation for the Shaw Brothers’ The Battle Wizard), Donnie Yen takes the role of exiled beggar chieftain Qiao Feng. Building on the source material’s focus on connections to land and kin, Feng finds himself exiled from his clan, his family, and his temple, branded a villain by all he encounters and setting out to find the righteous path out of a dire situation.
The film is arguably at its best when it zeroes in on Feng’s character and the trials he must endure, struggling with what he knows of himself as one on the path of the Buddha, and the suspiciously-concerted efforts made to sever his ties to everyone else while war brews between the empires of Song and Liao.
While the efforts made to artificially halve Yen’s age to fit the character can be conspicuous in places, he still sells the tragic, almost-Grecian trappings of Qiao Feng with palpable heart. His scenes opposite Chen Yuqi as his confidante and love interest Azhu are quite sweet as well.
But hey, you’re likely not getting into this for the philosophically-minded melodrama; the more vital question is: “Does Donnie Yen still kick arse?” Well, yes, considerably so. Right from his introduction set against a fire-fisted adversary, the combination of strong choreography and gravity-defying wire-fu (not to mention more than a few severed limbs along the way) give his Action Team a lot of room to show off and shatter bone and wood with equal intensity. It leans heavily into the fantastical side of wuxia, to the point where some of the spirit-power-wielding bombast resembles manga rather than manhua, but it never lets the effects work distract too much from the flesh-and-blood physicality on display.
Donnie Yen went into this with the hopes of giving Chinese cinema its own MCU, to the point of describing wuxia as Chinese Marvel (!), and that shows through here in both good and bad ways. Good, in that it taps into a solid world-ready universality in its depiction of one man’s fight to hold onto his ideals in the face of an unjust world, almost like it’s splitting the difference between Clint Eastwood’s early Westerns and his more recent biographical dramas. Bad, in that it has a serious thirst for franchising, sacrificing storytelling cohesion for sequel-bait and Return of the King amounts of false conclusions. Most aspects still add to the narrative importance of bonds between people and groups, granted, but it can feel like it’s overcomplicating what could have been a very strong and insular tale.
Sakra is a vanity project through and through, with a lead role most actor-filmmakers would drool over, but it’s one that Donnie Yen gives his all into presenting right. Its ambitions as a global crowd-pleaser can lead to it putting the cart before the horse structurally, but between the high-flying fight scenes and the compelling character drama, it works both as its own brooding entity and as a potentially interesting IP going forward.
