Gallants – Review

Gallants is a surprisingly adept debut feature that hearkens back to the glory days of martial arts cinema before it was a general prerequisite to make your film either an awful comedy or a lackluster, brooding drama. Remember those days when martial arts films had both great choreography and comedy with stars who actually had charisma? Gallants will bring you back to these glory days as it lovingly embraces the style and traditions of the 70′s Shaw Brothers martial arts classics to create a film that is somewhat of a loving parody but mostly an homage that updates this style for a new age.

The movie follows geeky office worker Cheung (You-Nam Wong) who is sent to a remote village to negotiate property rights for his real estate company. Through a series of events, he winds up befriending two old martial artists, Dragon and Tiger (veteran martial arts stars Kuan Tai Chen and Siu-Lung Leung respectively), who are running a teashop which used to be their teacher Master Law’s (60′s HK pop idol and 80′s comedy star Teddy Robin Kwan) kung-fu school while also simultaneously taking care of Master Law, who fell into a coma three decades ago. When the school is attacked by rival gym boss and local landlord Pong’s (Wai-Man Chan) thugs, Master Law awakens and helps repel the attack. Afterwards, Master Law imagines Cheung is both Dragon and Tiger and begins training him in preparation for an upcoming martial arts tournament, a nice twist on the usual student-master formula.

This is the type of film that I can see working as a great gateway into the older martial arts classics just on the marvellous performances of the older stars. Dragon and Tiger are incredibly quick and fun to watch, both in dialogue and action scenes, they end up carrying the first half of the film effortlessly. Despite all that, they still manage to get the show stolen from them by Master Law who is just an absolute joy to watch with solid comedic timing. Not all the performances are like this though as Cheung is a rather boring character who never really wins you over at any point in the story, it’s a shame he isn’t utilized in a better way. It is refreshing to see that at the end of the movie, he doesn’t become some sort of phenomenal martial artist though. He’s still just the average guy who is now just pretty good at kung-fu. Speaking of kung-fu, the fight sequences are done very well, these old masters may be getting up in the years but they haven’t lost their touch one bit.

In summary, all the fight scenes are done in a pretty realistic fashion with not too much slow motion or ridiculous jump kicks (though they do still exist). My only real complaints about the action is a few too many animated “impact” sequences and the odd ill placed effect.  Gallants is a very impressive debut outing that not only avoids many of the pitfalls of the genre but manages to give new hope to a resurrection of the good old days of the Shaw Brothers. It’s probably a bit too early and misguided to hope for this to spark that revival, but a man can dream, can’t he?