Original title: 黑帖
China, the outskirts of the Martial World, where a gang of mediocre bullies is a major threat. After four years of wandering, major servant’s son Nian Zhu (Pai Ying) returns to the community he left for reasons of broken hearts and personal dignity. He doesn’t appear to come back with anything more than the shirt he left in on his back and a somewhat ratty looking umbrella. In truth, Nian Zhu has learned rather awesome kung fu, but has taken his master’s lessons about not using violence to heart so deeply, he’ll go out of his way to hide his abilities. That’ll cost a lot of people, obviously.
But really, how much kung fu does a man need to reconnect with his father (Kao Ming) and the lady love (Han Hsiang-Chin) who waited for him – and who is the adoptive daughter of his father’s patrician boss?
Turns out quite a bit of kung fu, for our protagonist’s old home is under threat from a group of bandits living and working in the nearby hills. Said bandits have been terrorizing the local communities for some time now. Their modus operandi is to send out the titular “black invitations” with their money and rich people’s daughters and mistresses wish list, and come down hard on anyone resisting. Apart from the kind of kung fu that’d get them kicked off the movie early in many another kung fu film, the bad guys also utilize the least subtle spy available, traitorous, not the least bit suspicious Wan Ren-Mei (Wan Chung-Shan).
Somehow, it will take a whole movie to take these guys down, with a couple of kidnappings and the usual scenes of the non-violent hero getting tortured before that blissful state of ass-kicking can be achieved.
In some regards, Chou Hsu-Chiang’s Taiwanese martial arts movie Black Invitation feels as if it were a predecessor to the thoughtful mid-period style of the great King Hu. It is at least much more concerned with philosophical concerns and the personal drama of Nian Zhu’s past and relationships than with pulling the audience from one fight to the next. In the early stages of the film, this works rather well, partially because Pai Ying very capably embodies the emotional weight of a world-weary homecoming through every expression and movement. There’s an effective sense of melancholia running through the early parts of the film, of lives not lived to their best, and certainly not their fullest, of youthful idealism getting ground down by a world that simply doesn’t care.
The more the film needs to integrate its more traditional wuxia plot, the less interesting it becomes. Not because there’s anything wrong with integrating the emotional-philosophical with the martial arts tropes, but because the film’s martial arts elements never really convince. The villains are less than impressive, so much so they never feel like the threat everybody around treats them as.
Worse, the martial arts scenes have a couple or three fun ideas, but their execution is much below what you can expect from a Taiwanese film of this era. It is difficult to say if the choreography (apparently by Pai Ying himself) is the problem, for Chou cuts away from all moments of impact and stages every single action scene in a way that hides forms, postures, and movement, as if this were an early 80s low budget martial arts movie made in the US.
This is particularly frustrating because the first one and a half acts are fine indeed, the melodrama perhaps a little stiff but the film’s approach to its protagonist’s plight genuinely moving; the rest of Black Invitation however, leaves much to be desired.