Jade Tiger

Ti Lung’s wedding gets crashed. Someone left his father’s headless corpse as a gift. Not the kind of thing you can just ignore.

What follows is revenge, betrayal, and enough double-crosses to make your head spin—assuming it stays attached. This is Shaw Brothers doing wuxia noir, and director Chor Yuen has ideas bigger than his budget. The early scenes play out on obvious soundstages. You can practically see the seams. Yuen frames everything tight, compensation masquerading as style.

Then a blind assassin pops out his own eyes and throws them at our hero. They explode like grenades. Suddenly those tight frames are an asset.

As Lung infiltrates the poison-slinging Tang Clan, the script piles on characters. In one scene, Lung encounters a master who travels in the “Coffin of the Living Dead.” The man delivers one line. The scene works beautifully. You could imagine a Jim Brown cameo in the Hollywood version.

About halfway through, Lo Lieh shows up as our primary antagonist, a Tang sadist, and chews scenery with precision. The scenes between him and Lung crackle.

Composer Chen Yung-Yu deserves credit too. During a nighttime infiltration sequence, his score builds atmosphere without forcing emotion down your throat. It enhances rather than dictates.

But the script can’t sustain its ambitions. The first half teases genuine moral complexity. Lung must choose between killing his own clansmen or blowing his cover. These are the moments that could elevate Jade Tiger into Shaw Brothers’ upper echelon.

Then the second half arrives and the plotting turns contrived. Holes appear like trapdoors. The finale wants to land with tragic weight about the cost of clan rivalries. What it delivers is melodrama and idiot plot mechanics. The whole thing plays like a cautionary tale about poor management.

Still, the fights deliver. Yuen stages violence with imagination, not just choreography. And that final shot—Lung alone in temple ruins, the camera pulling back to reveal the ocean—feels like a promise of the movie this could have been. For ninety-plus minutes, we were stuck on soundstages. Now, suddenly, the world opens up. Too late, but beautiful.

Jade Tiger entertains even when it frustrates. Another script polish, a few more thousand dollars, and this could have been a classic. As it stands, it’s Shaw Brothers doing what Shaw Brothers does: making something out of nothing, style out of necessity, grenades out of eyeballs.

You could do worse.