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My initial impressions on Born Invincible was that someone must have put the actors’ names on pieces of paper and thrown them into a hat… Lung Fei turned out to be the bad acting Fei Lung who was the master of the good guys. Jack Long was a student instead of an old master. He did not seem to be a white-haired collar with a retractable groin slash Lo Lie’s character though he is in the cast. At least Nancy Yen was fortunate she really got one of the lady parts!
And we start, as always, with a sort of mini-documentary of Tai Chi… tai chi is not a bunch of old people doing morning exercises in the parks as this movie paints it to be, rather it’s a kid who undergoes training that … will render him virtually invincible… with hair white, a strange to the ear voice and looking like Carter Wong.
From there, we carry on to Lei Ping’s school, where we save an elderly man and his daughter from the Chin San gang (played by choreographers Corey Yuen Kwai and Yuen Shun-yi, who wear wigs that resemble old mop rags). Lei Ping school’s master is played by Lung Fei. He is a great example of a good man who is truly a liability. He is usually punishes his pupils for helping the weak. Most ludicrous of all, he forces one of his students, Mark Long, to undergo 3 years of life without kung fu practice!
Here, we have once more some bizarre casting. The masters from the Chin San gang arrived to kill Lei Ping’s master and senior pupil. They wanted to take advantage of the situation and get their vengeance.
Lo Lieh portrays the more accepted Chin Sang master, but he does get the English voiceover from that British voice over artist with the soft, feminine, eunuch style voice (for the British audience, he sounds like Melvyn Hayes; for the Americans, John Fielder). In a white wig and a glittery waistcoat, Carter Wong is voiced by Rick Thomas, who in fact doesn’t do high range well, but rather struggles to nail his character’s accent, which comes off as an unintentional blend of Apus from the Simpsons and Old Mother Riley. Moreover, Thomas has great difficulty pulling off the character’s laugh, which is _very_ important to the plot alongside Michael Reeves’ uneven performance, resulting in annoying and constant transitions to the Mandarin voiceover. To top off this comically bad portrayal, every time Wong performs his signature groin retraction, the sound of a slide whistle plays that resembles the one featured in “The Man with the Golden Gun” during that heinous 360-degree car stunt.
The Lei Ping school is populated with dull fools, which does not improve the rather absurd villains any. Mark Long’s role is the only one who is vaguely realistic, and like many of the earlier post-Big Boss bashers, the story contrives to keep him from fighting as long as possible and even by standards of this genre, 3 years is ridiculous! The villains could die of old age in that time!
I seem to remember Born Invincible having a good reputation in some quarters, Rare Kung Fu Movies’ eccentric Falk or was an admirer, but the movie as a whole, as funny as it is, is affected by a comically contrived storyline, unfunny heroes AND villains, and some mild fight choreography that, despite being designed by Yuen Woo-ping, is too frame-cutting and double unpinned.
I will say this: it is indeed worth a look for those who thought merely Carter Wong replacing his bullfrog impression in Big Trouble in Little China could not get a more ludicrous role…
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