Black Mask begins with Jet Li being surrounded by a couple of dozen soldiers with heavy firepower. He’s asked to surrender, but being Jet Li he refuses. Instead, he quickly grabs one of the men, takes his machine gun, and lets loose a flurry of bullets. The soldiers immediately fire back but Jet Li uses the guy he’s still got a hold of as a body shield. Because we all know one human body will stop all the bullets no matter how many or the caliber. Then he leaps up, grabbing hold of some kind of metal chandelier cage thing. Spinning in that contraption, he unleashes another storm of bullets. The soldiers continue firing on him, but of course, the metal cage blocks their bullets even though at least half of it is completely open.
Buy Black Mask Blu-rayEven though they are inside what seems to be a working warehouse with crates and boxes stacked all around them, the soldiers bring in a tank. It blows up the cage thing and a couple of cars but leaves Jet Li more or less unscathed. Suddenly, the room is full of lasers. Deadly lasers. We know that because they cut right through a board. Jet Li runs then slides right through them, managing to only get his jacket singed.
Then the opening credits roll. While all this was happening, some words on the screen appeared letting us know that Jet Li was part of an experimental supersoldier program titled “701.” A program that was aborted after one of the supersoldiers killed a bunch of innocent people. Those regular soldiers were there to kill Jet Li. As far as I can tell, what made these guys supersoldiers was that their nerve endings were severed thus making them impervious to pain, therefore, invincible. Because everyone knows if you can’t feel your leg break, then you can still walk on it. If you feel no pain when you are shot, then you can continue to fight indefinitely. Apparently, the one thing that will kill them is if they are bled to death because this causes heart failure.
That auspicious beginning is pretty much all you need to know about Black Mask. It is completely and utterly ridiculous. Its plot makes very little sense. Everything about it is turned to “11.” The acting is bad. The CGI dubious. And yet it is rather charming. It is a film that knows it is dumb and yet has fun with it. I did too.
After Jet Li (sorry, I should probably start using his character name. It is Tsui Chik, AKA Black Mask) escapes, he settles down in Hong Kong as a mild-mannered librarian. Naturally, this doesn’t last long as his former team resurfaces and immediately begins creating havoc by killing off all the drug dealers in the city. There is a scene about this point in the film where the last drug dealer standing is called off to some industrial park. Once there, he realizes half his men have been brutally murdered. Then out of nowhere a sprinkler head pops up and squirts the rest of them with acid. I love a villain with completely insane methods of killing.
They are killing all the drug dealers for…reasons. Honestly, I was never quite sure of the plot points regarding this. But Tsui Chik doesn’t like them doing it so he dons his Black Mask outfit (which looks surprisingly like Bruce Lee in The Green Hornet) and gets down to kicking ass. He’s taken aback when he learns his former pupil, Yeuk Laan (Françoise Yip), is part of the destructive gang. This creates the most meaningful bit of drama, if indeed you can call it drama. This film doesn’t know how to handle anything except its action.
There is also a bit of comic relief and an almost love interest in one of the other librarians (Karen Mok) who keeps getting herself in trouble. The Big Bad is played with gusto by Kong Lung. Ching Wan Lau is a police inspector who is assigned to the drug-dealer-killing case and also happens to be Tsui Chik’s friend. Honestly, none of this matters. The plot is nonsense and the character development is either underdeveloped or just plain silly. Nobody watches this type of film for anything other than the action sequences and Black Mask utterly delivers in that department.
Yuen Woo-ping handled the choreography and even though it is sometimes a little too chopped up in the editing department, his Oscar-winning abilities shine completely through.
There is a scene in which a dude has a bomb implanted inside his torso. The surgeons must wear protective gear while trying to remove it whilst being surrounded by the bomb squad telling them which wires to cut. Tsui Chik often kills people by throwing compact disks at them like they were throwing stars. Hands are chopped off. The 701 squad are repeatedly shot but since they feel no pain, they only look at their gaping holes with bemusement. Someone pushes a pipe into Tsui Chik’s gut to siphon all his blood out. The finale gets even more crazy.
It is a ridiculous, wild ride. Honestly, it was a bit much for me. I like my action to be a little more grounded, and my movies to have some semblance of story and interesting characters. But if you can just get into the film’s wavelength, it is a lot of fun.
Eureka Entertainment presents Black Mask in four different versions. There is the original Hong Kong version (100 minutes), a significantly cut and dubbed U.S. version (87 minutes), a slightly different Taiwan edit (100 minutes), and for the first time, a cut that ties them all together (102 minutes). I watched that last version and I can’t say I recommend it. Many of the formerly cut moments have not been restored in any way so the video and audio quality is distractingly bad. There are other moments when the (usually Chinese) audio switches over to English. As far as I can tell, there isn’t anything added that significantly adds to the story. It is mostly just snippets of scenes lasting for just a few seconds, giving us a bit of extra dialog or looks from the characters.
Extras include two new commentaries – one with Frank Djeng on the Hong Kong version and one with Mike Leeder and Arne Venema on the U.S. version. There are also interviews with stuntman Mike Lambert, film critic Andrew Heskins, and author Leon Hunt. It also comes with new artwork from Grégory Sacré and a booklet with an essay from James Oliver.
