DJariya

Trailer:

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Will be released in theaters here in the States July 28th.

Here's the list of theaters that will be showing it:

http://wellgousa.com/theatrical/wolf...or-2#showtimes


For those who have never heard of this series, the 1st movie came out in 2015 and starred Wu Jing and Scott Adkins. It's currently on DVD/BD and is on Netflix too. It's pretty awesome.

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Brian T

Well Frank Grillo's no Steven Seagal or Mike Tyson, but I'd give it a shot. Mainlanders are certainly getting a lot of mileage out of Africa these days (presumably thanks to the country's ever-expanding ties there).

DJariya

The Russo Brothers apparently helped on this movie. They were Action consultants:

http://www.maactioncinema.com/archives/5311

It's a huge hit in China:

http://variety.com/2017/film/asia/ch...ce-1202510593/

Still playing in limited release here in the States.

mrhan

The first movie was okay. Hopefully this one is better. Wu Jing hasn't been in anything worth remembering since SPL. I really like him but the films he's been in after SPL have been pretty forgettable.

E Unit

Never heard of this movie or the first one, but I loved Wu Jing in SPL. That last fight with Yen was the best. I may check this out at some point.

DJariya

As I said in post #1, the 1st movie is currently on Netflix for streaming. Netflix is still carrying a few Well Go USA titles.

Ash Ketchum

WOLF WARRIOR II is playing at a theater in Manhattan, where I saw it on Friday. It's quite an impressive action spectacle, with several exciting setpieces, including a tank battle staged at a sprawling Chinese industrial plant in Africa. The hero, a People's Liberation Army vet played by Jing Wu, is your typical indestructible action hero, skilled at martial arts and all manner of weapons operations, and subject to the kind of punishment that would kill 20 such heroes, yet he keeps bouncing back unscathed. You've seen this all before in countless Hollywood action films, most notably the 1980s Rambo films, among the films which clearly served as the model for this, but with updated filming and editing techniques (plus loads of CGI). Now the Chinese are doing it and with the same kind of production values.

It's also blatant Chinese nationalist propaganda and is being used to serve China's agenda of positioning itself in the popular imagination as the dominant global superpower, now that America seems to be withdrawing from any meaningful leadership on the world stage, a point made explicitly in the film. And now that China is determined to exploit Africa's resources, it treats the Africans in the film the same way so many Hollywood and British films have over the decades--as either bloodthirsty savages or passive victims of violence buffeted about by rebels or foreigners. There are only three African characters with any real screen time: two of them are children, a boy and a girl, and the third is the boy's heavyset mother, who breaks into "Amazing Grace" at one point as the factory workers are hiding out. I kid you not.

The evil mercenaries leading the African rebel army are American and European and they represent the most formidable opponents to our hero and his two Chinese army vet allies. (The African security guards at the plant offer no help whatsoever.) Counterbalancing this is the female lead, an American doctor working on a relief mission with Doctors without Borders who becomes our hero's partner. She's played by Celina Jade, a Hong Kong actress whose father is Roy Horan, an American who once acted in HK kung fu films playing bad guys. Much of the dialogue is in English. The Chinese characters speak to themselves in Mandarin but speak English to everyone else. Other languages are used in African-only scenes.

It's a very instructive film if you follow China or China-U.S. relations at all.

The tagline on the Chinese-language poster for the film is "Anyone who offends China will be killed no matter how far the target is."

DJariya

http://dlvr.it/PdpkKH

This movie has made $680M+

Huge blockbuster.

mrhan

It's playing near me. I don't have time until next weekend to see it. Hopefully, it will still be there.

d2cheer

I though I read on Dark Horizons that it is the biggest movie in China ever. Whoa...

Brian T

It's nice to see this movie being called out on most critical fronts -- even here a wee bit -- for exactly what it is. Hollywood-grade production polish and reasonably decent 3D aside, this was eye-rolling propaganda of epic proportions, every bit as jingoistic and divisive (and, I must admit, shamefully entertaining, to a degree) as certain earlier American movies with which it's rightly being thematically compared, only from "the other side" politically. Mind you, that eye-rolling is a feeling engendered in me by most Mainland Chinese movies, especially the pro-Party blockbusters of recent years -- if the hoary propaganda isn't outright explicit, it's often implicit by what so many of the country's filmmakers are forbidden from depicting in their work. The fact that they think this would fool anyone should be laughable, but I'm sure younger generations, especially in revisionist-happy China, have been dazzled by all the sparkles.

Still wondering why I paid for the big screen experience when I normally avoid that for mainland Chinese movies, nearly all of which play theatres here. Guess the obvious scope, gloss and mention of 3D in the trailers got the better of me along with my own perverse fascination with gross propaganda like this (Chinese, American, Russian, whatever; hell, I paid to see the "premiere" of North Korean propaganda at TIFF a few years back). It was playing close by, too, so there's that. It drew a small crowd on a normally busy night here, but I'm sure the still somewhat hearty bootleg circuit here keeps many Chinese from bothering when they can blow a toonie on a disc or find it online already for free.

The film's makers can justifiably point to Hollywood antecedents and their patronizing treatment of "lesser" cultures, but even by comparison this show takes the cake, at least until I can lay my eyes upon the glory of China Salesman! It'd be amusing to see like to see a new, equally blowhardy American "response" to this -- especially since it's highly likely there will be more CCP-approved installments to follow -- but it seems American filmmakers have evolved past a willingness to make good old-fashioned racist/colonialist, religion-free chest-thumpers like this anymore. Such movies seem to require an Important Liberal Message® nowadays to make sure we feel appropriately appalled at the activities of our governments.

A Chinese friend mentioned the poster tagline was something along the lines of "those who attack China will be hunted down, etc." but I'm sure ten different people will give ten varied translations.


I'd find this more impressive -- as I would many of China's "biggest movie ever" records of years past -- if China didn't literally BAN all new non-Chinese movies from their screens during key time frames every year. This movie succeeded in a vacuum created by the CCP expressly for that purpose. I'm very grateful that here in North America, at least, we let Mainland Chinese movies -- even transparent propaganda like this one -- play on screens right alongside Hollywood movies whenever they like, all year long.

Ash Ketchum

Has there ever been a Mainland Chinese action film like this before, set in contemporary times and featuring a proud veteran of the PLA--or some similar govt. or party institution--taking on foreign enemies? It's definitely something new for the Chinese audience, as far as I can tell. So I can see why it would be greeted enthusiastically.

Why So Blu?

The first Wolf Warrior film was just like this one, but Scott Adkins was the bad guy in that one. Production values, Wu Jing, martial arts fights, etc., were all top notch but it was basically a "China, fuck yeah!" type of film. I also hate America, fuck yeah movies, too.

Brian T

OPERATION MEKONG beat it to the punch last year and I must admit in retrospect, that was a much bigger eye-roller than WOLF 2, but hey, they're both made for Mainland Chinese audiences who've been denied this kind of entertainment for literally decades, so I say let 'em have it. After all, we've been enjoying our own meat-headed "America Fuck Yeah" versions of these movies for three or four decades now, even back while China was still stuck in an ideological quagmire. Western audiences have simply had more time to acknowledge, debate and even lampoon the inherent silliness and/or dangerous thinking behind such films. This new Chinese variant just adds heaps more stridency and didacticism, something Mainland audiences are accustomed to at a molecular level, and foists it on a massive population not really predisposed to applying critical thinking to homemade propaganda, especially when it's got so many sparkles 'n 'splosions! WOLF 2 is a better film in general than MEKONG, but they're both entertaining and technologically adept, so there's that

I'm pretty sure there were similar movies before these two -- titles elude me -- but they suffered the usual ideological rigidity and budget starvation that kept them from being released outside the country other than on discs you might stumble across in your local Chinatown.

I suppose some of the "big budget" action movie co-productions between China and the formerly free Hong Kong could be included as predecessors to WOLF WARRIOR 2 since they occasionally feature "noble and moral" mainland soldiers/cops/supermen pairing with their HK counterparts to take down some inevitably foreign-masterminded plot, sometimes featuring sequences shot in countries in which China is increasingly invested (VIRAL FACTOR comes to mind, but my memory may be off on that one). Because of the HK industry's longer history with pan-Asian and international distribution, these movies had an easier foot in the door than the more straight-laced and simplistic endeavors from the Mainland before stuff like MEKONG and WOLF came along. In that sense, Oxide Pang's largely dreadful MY WAR, also from last year, comes to mind. It could sorta-kinda be considered in league with these two. It's likewise impressive in it's flashy action scenes but literally nothing else, although its Korean War setting isn't quite "contemporary" and its ham-fisted propagandizing puts it more in league with pompous bores like the FOUNDING trilogy.

Ash Ketchum

The New York Times acknowledges this film and its success, although it didn't bother to review it when it opened in New York.

It doesn't mention that the film is even playing in New York, nor that the lead female character is American.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/w...ef=todayspaper

Brian T

The CCP will cry Fake News® by omission!

Interesting read, except for the "spoiling most of the movie" bits near the end. That interview quote attributed to Wu Jing makes him seem a bit pompous, but then he's pretty much a Party mouthpiece at this point so that doesn't surprise. Glad the piece also acknowledges the criticism the film has taken for its patronizing attitude toward Africans. Considering that the regard with which the Chinese (and other other cultures in Asia) hold black people is only a few notches above the kitchen table bigots over here (albeit from the point of view of a less-entwined, less complicated history, so 'ignorance' can at least be claimed somewhat more honestly), seeing the Mainland Chinese portrayed as saviors of Africans is no less galling than when American films have sought to do the same thing. Perhaps it's time for Nollywood or whatever other African film center to step up its game and push back against both portrayals with it's own big budget action hero epic. Certainly some of their filmmakers will approach that level of capability in the coming years, so it may only be a matter of time!

As suggested in the article, this movie probably would've been another stentorian bore comprised of "flawless party heroes and ... political lectures" were it not for the Wu making his character a decidedly uncharacteristic-by-Mainland-standards "moody individual on a quest", an action movie trope practically invented by Hollywood. That was, I think, the film's sharpest move. If other Chinese action filmmakers are now able to capitalize on that without their hypocritical government slapping them down, especially now that there's proof it can fire up the public to the tune of big box office, the game might truly change. I'm not overly confident that will happen -- this is China after all; too much of a good thing must always be stamped out -- but it would be interesting to see.

DJariya

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...wakens-1031143

Has now made $769M in box office. Holy shit. Massive blockbuster for a Chinese film.

You think they'll greenlight a Wolf Warrior III?

Ash Ketchum

There's a teaser at the end of WOLF WARRIOR II that sets up a sequel.

joewolf

My god, this was so much better than Operation Mekong. I loved this movie! The relentless yet never tiresome action, the way every action scene is almost casually SUPERB, and the cheap yet super effective heart-tugging moments -- They all landed perfectly for me. You can FEEL Wu Jing's passion coming through every frame. The last action flick that did this for me was Mad Max Fury Road. Not that Wolf Warrior 2 is anywhere near as sophisticated or good as Fury Road, but they are both propulsive action epics that give off the distinct vibe that the director is throwing everything he has into it.

I saw Atomic Blonde in the same week and it felt like watching paint dry in comparison. Seriously, the action in WW2 is insane. Even the smallest of fights have crazy intricate moves but done at warp fucking speed with painful looking contact. It's like 80s/90s Hong Kong cinema re-imagined with post-CraigBond aesthetics and brutality. Operation Condor filtered through 90s Bruckheimer and Fury Road. Also, I don't know who Heidi Moneymaker is, but she's a sexy beast.

As for it being propaganda, yep, it certainly is. To me, its form of nationalism is more palatable as it's in the old Hollywood style of "be proud of yourself & your country, help others, but don't take any shit" versus the insidious "everyone else are savages out to get us, don't trust strangers, get ready to kill" style of Red Dawn. I also felt it was slightly less boneheaded than past Chinese propaganda films as it begrudgingly but repeatedly acknowledges China is not actually the best (yet). Then again, I'm not African. Not quite sure how I would feel about the film if I was.

Overall, an insane action epic. Bring on part 3!

DJariya

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...6efad243bc30d7

Coming to BD on December 12th.

Here's the Amazon placeholder. No price at the moment.

DJariya

For those who may be interested, this is now on Hulu:

https://www.hulu.com/watch/1234979?cb=1521384581392


Final box office tally:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/...lfwarrior2.htm

This made $870M+ worldwide.

Why So Blu?

And since it's on Hulu it's only in stereo there -- 2.0.

RichC2

Further breakdown:



US it made about $2.7m.

Brian T

Always worth breaking these Mainland China "blockbusters" down further, since about 98% of any "global" boxoffice usually comes from the domestic release, where they're preaching to the choir and have the government on side to stifle competition so as many people as possible drink the kool-aid. Say what you will about the similarly meatheaded and propagandistic American action pictures made in the 1980's, but at least they were produced -- then as now –– in a country where you could freely create entertainments deeply critical of the government at the same time.

Inhumans99

Thanks for the reminder, I will have to give it a look see this weekend.