Iron Monkey (1993) Review: Robin Hood With Flying Feet

Is Iron Monkey worth watching?

Yes. Iron Monkey is a breathless, inventive Hong Kong kung fu adventure, and its fight scenes remain among the most joyful ever staged. Yuen Woo-ping builds a simple Robin Hood story around action that is fast, witty and endlessly resourceful, and a young Donnie Yen shows the star power that would carry him for decades. The reservation is tone: the film swings from slapstick to cruelty to sentiment with little warning, and some of its comedy has aged poorly.

What is Iron Monkey about?

Iron Monkey is set in a provincial town in Qing-dynasty China, where corrupt officials grow fat while the poor go hungry. A masked bandit named after a benevolent deity, the Iron Monkey, robs the powerful and hands the spoils to the needy, and the town’s governor is humiliated by his failure to catch him. Yu Rongguang plays Dr. Yang, the town’s respected physician, and the film makes little mystery of his double life.

The complication arrives in the form of a travelling doctor and martial artist, Wong Kei-ying (Donnie Yen), who passes through town with his young son, the boy who will grow up to be the folk hero Wong Fei-hung. When Wong is caught up in the governor’s hunt, he is pressed into tracking the bandit down, with his son’s safety used as leverage.

The film is directed by Yuen Woo-ping, the choreographer who later designed the fights for The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It is a Hong Kong production in Cantonese and runs a tight 90 minutes.

Yuen Woo-ping’s fights have a sense of humour

What makes Iron Monkey special is not the speed of its action, though it is very fast, but the wit of its staging. Yuen treats each fight like a comic routine with a physical punchline: combatants use whatever the scene offers, and the geometry of a room becomes part of the choreography. The wirework is more elaborate than in the grounded kung fu films of the 1970s, but it rarely floats free of gravity entirely; bodies still hit hard.

The film’s great trick is to pit two decent men against each other. Because both Yang and Wong are healers and honourable fighters, their clashes play less like hero against villain and more like a debate between equals, and Yuen choreographs them with a mutual respect that the audience can feel.

A young Donnie Yen, and a scene-stealing child

Yen, still some years from the international fame of the Ip Man films, is magnetic here. He plays Wong with a stern, fatherly gravity that makes his acrobatics all the more startling, and the physical precision that defines his later work is already fully formed. Yu Rongguang is a fine counterpart, warm and wry, and the pairing is the heart of the film.

Angie Tsang plays the young Wong Fei-hung, a boy’s role taken by a girl, and holds her own in the action with real conviction. Seeing the future legend as a sulky, fiercely loyal child gives the film a sweet undercurrent that sits well beside the mayhem. Jean Wang, as Yang’s loyal assistant, adds calm to a film that rarely stops moving.

Where the tone wobbles

Iron Monkey lacks the polish of the lavish wuxia epics that followed it, and it shows in places. The corrupt officials are played as broad caricatures, and scenes of cruelty and suffering among the poor sit uncomfortably beside knockabout comedy. The chief villains are more colourful than frightening. None of this dims the action, but viewers expecting a unified tone or the grandeur of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon should adjust their expectations.

Who should watch Iron Monkey?

It is ideal for martial arts fans, for anyone curious about how Hong Kong action shaped Hollywood fight choreography, and for viewers who like their adventure stories short and fleet. At 90 minutes, it never outstays its welcome. The violence is frequent and occasionally cruel, including scenes of punishment and torture, though it is not especially graphic.

Three good follow-ups:

• Drunken Master, Yuen Woo-ping’s 1978 comedy starring Jackie Chan as a grown-up, badly behaved Wong Fei-hung.
• Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Yuen’s other early Jackie Chan hit, a template for comic kung fu.
• SPL: Kill Zone, which shows Donnie Yen’s fighting style translated into a brutal modern crime film.

The verdict

Iron Monkey is a compact, crowd-pleasing martial arts classic, bursting with invention and anchored by two leads who fight like dancers and spar like equals. Its tonal lurches and cartoonish villains keep it from perfection, but few films in the genre are this much fun to watch.

Rating: 4/5