The Fist of the Condor (2023)

Original title: El Puño del Cóndor

A mysterious, shaven-headed, nearly mythical fighter (Marko Zaror) is setting out from his monk-like retreat to take some kind of vengeance. It takes quite some time, and a series of flashbacks, half-flashbacks and voice overs to reveal that he is searching for his twin brother (obviously also Marko Zaror), who took everything that meant anything to him some years ago.

Among the things taken was the manual to the powerful fighting technique the Inca used against the conquistadors, the Fist of the Condor. While our warrior hero sets out on his quest, his evil brother begins taking his own steps back into the world, or rather, he sends his brutal and really rather unpleasant disciple Kalari (Eyal Meyer) out on some nasty business that’s meant to make our protagonist suffer some more before Kalari is supposed to kill him.

It’s been quite a few years since last I saw one of the usually pretty fantastic low budget martial arts movies from Chile starring Marko Zaror – who does quite a bit of work in Hollywood on the stunt and choreography side these days, but still seems to make an independent martial arts or action movie in Chile every few years.

As always directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, this particular outing is probably not the best introduction to Zaror’s body of work for the completely uninitiated. Not because it is a bad or mediocre martial arts film – the fight sequences are all somewhere between great and absolutely inspired, mixing the beefy-brutal with the elegant in a highly convincing manner. Rather, it is the film’s narrative that might give quite a few viewers pause, or rather, a narrative structure that takes a rather straightforward vengeance tale and pulls it into temporal loops and twists that can remind one more of the temporal approaches sometimes found in arthouse cinema than of the way martial arts and action movies like to present themselves. To my eyes, it does so successfully, indeed deepening its narrative instead of obfuscating it. I can imagine myself coming out of this confused and a bit irritated watching it in the wrong mood, however.

Of course, simply going with the flow and enjoying its structural peculiarities as simple trippyness would be another fruitful, at the very least highly enjoyable, way of approaching the film as well.

The other possible stumbling block is how seriously and straight-faced Fist of the Condor takes itself as a philosophical tale of martial arts as a way to nurture body and spirit. There is no sense of irony to it at all, nor any attempt to put even the tiniest bit of distance between long monologues about martial arts philosophy and its audience. While I’m clearly not of the same mindset as the filmmakers, I do appreciate this seriousness of purpose, and even more so the risk one takes when putting oneself out there like they do.

But then, putting themselves out there, making the film these filmmakers want – perhaps need – to make, seems to be rather the point of Fist of the Condor, apart from showing off Zaror’s sculpted body and a series of great fight scenes in often spectacular landscapes (the old adage of nature being the best special effect holds), of course. This is a film that’s rather a lot more ambitious than most low budget action movies, and therefore takes the elements of the genre it is interested in and shapes them into forms it finds more interesting and pleasing, even if they will be confusing to some.

Past Misdeeds: Mirageman (2007)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

When he and his brother were young, Maco's (Marko Zaror) parents were killed in a robbery. Maco now works as the bouncer of a slightly classier strip club, but his parents' deaths hasn't left him with much of a life - he's honing his martial arts skills alone in his nearly empty cellar hole of an apartment and is obsessed with physical fitness, and that's all he has in life. He certainly has neither friends nor lovers.
Maco is still less hurt than his brother who lives in a mental institution, traumatized and depressed and unable to even leave his room.

One night on his way to work, Maco witnesses a robbery. He kicks the perpetrators' asses, donning the mask he takes from one of them for no reason he himself could explain, rescues their victims and flees. One of the victims (Maria Elena Swett) is a TV reporter and on the next evening news, Maco finds himself styled as a masked vigilante hero.

His brother sees the news too, and the newly made hero seems to help him to get in contact with reality again. With a motivator this strong, Maco really doesn't have much of a choice. He buys himself a reasonably silly outfit and tries to become the masked vigilante his brother dreams of.

At first, his exploits aren't always dignified, but everything goes reasonably well. Things change for him with rising popularity, though, and soon he has to cope with the dark side of the vigilante business - a media circus that wants to use him and eat him up, criminal enemies who are more dangerous than your typical street thug and the simple fact that Maco himself is not made of steel nor a millionaire playboy.

Mirageman demonstrates admirably that you don't need Hollywood blockbuster money to create a good superhero movie. Director/writer Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and his star and martial arts and stunt expert Marko Zaror (who before made Kiltro, "the first South-American martial arts movie", if I can believe what I read) take the whole masked vigilante thing down a to the street level and into something more akin to reality as we know it and ask the question how and why a physically normal man in modern Chile would go about being a hero of a sort. It's probably as close to realism as you would want a film like it to be.

The film's low budget aesthetic helps a lot to build this mood. Espinoza uses a lot of handheld camera (not to be misinterpreted as "shaky-cam"), while at least some of the film is obviously shot guerrilla style on the streets, giving everything a gritty sheen which reminds every reviewer writing about the film - me included -  of 70s cinema, as does the third generation funky soundtrack. The colours are unfortunately very much of the yellow, blue and grey 2000s, but I'm willing to let this slide as one of the compromises people making movies without much money have to make to be able to produce something at all.

The first half of the film plays at least in parts for laughs, but it never overplays the humour in the way your typical spoof would do it. The film's humour instead arises mostly from thinking the difficulties of things like costume changes in real life through and looking at them in a clever and dry sort of way without any need to fall back on meanness or slapstick.

But Espinoza is also able to handle the darker and more tragic parts of his film well, shifting its mood from lightness to grimness in a fitting replica of the history of superhero comics. If one goes into the film only expecting sweetness and light and broken bones, one would probably be shocked by the big final battle.
There are also some very fine fights on display which Espinoza decides to show instead of hiding everything in them away by way of fast cutting and stupid camera effects. It does of course help that Zaror is an actual martial artist who is able to perform authentically enough looking fights without problems. To my surprise, Zaror shows himself also to be quite a decent actor, able to sell the psychological scars of his character well enough.

Of course there are flaws - the film's pacing is a little jagged and not every element and character is as clearly or logically developed as our hero and his brother. I found the deus ex machina character who helps Maco a few times especially clumsily inserted.

Still, its healthy mixture of believability and playfulness, comedy and tragedy is what makes Mirageman so satisfying. It's the great little superhero movie that could, even though too few people know about it.

Kiltro (2006)

The young Chilean Zamir (Marko Zaror) is the leader of a rather un-thuggish gang - or are they just a youth club? - known as (the) Kiltro(s).

After he rescued the young "Korean" girl Kim (Caterina Jadresic) from two rapists and got a kiss as reward, he of course fell in love with her. For two years now, he has been dogging each of her steps, punching every man who just so much as looks at her in the face. For some completely unfathomable reason, Kim is unimpressed by this kind and gentle courting and chooses instead to go out with a nice, blocky young gentleman known as The Maniac. It's enough to drive a stalking thug into depression.

All this is going to change when Max Kalba (Miguel Angel De Luca) returns to town and proceeds to kill some of the older men of the community, taking vengeance for past troubles which will be explained in exhaustive flashbacks throughout the film. For us, it will be enough to know that all of Max's victims belong to the martial arts sect of the Zetas and that Kim's father (Man Soo Yoon) is the one among them Max likes the least.

Soon, Zamir has a little run-in with Max when trying to protect Kim who has unfortunately learned nothing at all about fighting from her father. Of course, Zamir is thoroughly beaten, all his friends killed and Kim's father kidnapped (don't worry, Kim herself will be kidnapped soon enough too).

The dwarf Nik Nak (Roberto Avendano), another Zeta, takes care of Zamir and Kim, and sends our hero on the usual training journey so that he can learn how to better kill people and return to give Max a thorough killing to finally get his girl. Yay for feminism!

Kiltro is the first cooperation between writer/producer/director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and his star the actor/martial artist Marko Zaror. Both would very soon go on to make the excellent Mirageman together.

People who like to talk about stuff like that call Kiltro "the first Chilean martial arts film". That may well be true, it's just too bad that Kiltro isn't a good Chilean martial arts film.

Most of the film's problems can easily be explained through the inexperience of everyone involved and the usual lack of funds, but that doesn't make the thing much easier to watch.

It all begins with the acting. Zaror hasn't yet developed anything beyond a slack-faced stare into the camera, which makes it difficult to sympathize with a character who hasn't a lot of personality anyway, and who kills a lot more people in the course of the film than the supposed bad guy does. The other actors are even worse. Jadesic might be pretty, but is cursed with terrible "Asian" make-up and a role purely as an object that is to be rescued or kidnapped. Everyone else is mostly dreadful in one way or the other.

If the fights were numerous and good enough to distract from the acting, all this wouldn't be much of a problem in a martial arts film, but there isn't really all that much fighting going on and what is there is filmed in a mix of shaky cam and bad editing that shows as little as possible of what is going on. Which is somewhat ironic in a film whose best assets should be the martial arts skills of its lead actor.

Then there's the script, a Joseph Campbell inspired mess mostly consisting of scenes you know from other, better realized movies, stitched together without much of an idea about how to make a narrative out of them or how to merge the film's comedic aspirations with the melodramatic plot. Especially annoying are the repeated flashbacks that show the backstory in useless detail and stretch the film's budget and my patience as a viewer to a breaking point without any pay-off. And how could I forget one of the longest and most boring training sequences in martial arts history, cleverly consisting of Zaror's naked behind and lots of would-be philosophical talk, but little physical activity?

Basically, Kiltro shares the enthusiasm about filmmaking and the love for genre film that Mirageman would go on to channel into an extremely fine film, but does everything wrong the later film would do right. There are a few promising moments in here - a handful of cleverly set-up shots, thirty seconds of a fight scene, a few jokes that are actually funny, that sort of thing - but nothing I'd even mention without the knowledge of how good Espinoza and Zaror have shown themselves at learning from their mistakes.

I really can't recommend Kiltro unless you are such a big admirer of Mirageman that you just have to see what Espinoza and Zaror did first. Mirageman however...

 

Technorati-Tags: chilean movies,action,martial arts,ernesto diaz espinoza,marko zaror,reviews

On WTF: Mirageman (2007)

Who says you need Hollywood money to make a good superhero movie? Not I.

Learn what I do say about the Chilean film Mirageman in my review on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Tags: chilean movies,reviews,action,comedy,marko zaror,ernesto diaz espinoza,other places