Following in the footsteps of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen arrived on these shores in the early-to-mid-’90s as part of Quentin Tarantino’s martial arts revival when the filmmaker convinced Miramax to release Yen’s Hong Kong action movie Iron Monkey. Yen went on to appear in a handful of Hollywood films like Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II and the action sequel Shanghai Knights, all the while continuing to work in Hong Kong.
In recent years, he mainly has been focusing on bigger budget Chinese films, many of them huge hits in Asia. After working with director Wilson Yip on a number of gritty modern-day police action movies, he followed with a series of period action films about the martial arts legend Ip Man, all of which were hugely successful in China even though only a few of them have received theatrical releases in the States.
Yen’s latest movie to hit US theaters (and VOD) is Dragon (Wu Xia), which is more in vein with the latter as a period action film but this one mixes genres with Yen playing Liu Jin-Xi, a simple villager whose quiet family life is disrupted when two gangsters show up and force him to reveal his martial arts prowess. Before things can settle back down to normal, a detective named Xu Bai-ju (Takeshi Kaneshiro from House of the Flying Daggers) shows up to investigate the death of the gangsters and threatens to uncover Liu’s dark criminal past.
Radius-TWC has provided ComingSoon.net with an exclusive video clip which shows Yen’s character fighting two assassins sent by his former criminal boss once they discover he’s living in the village. Check it out below!
