Malaysian Martial Arts Flick KINTA Review

[Our thanks go out to regular ScreenAnarchy reader Agent Wax for the following review of Malaysian martial arts film Kinta.]

This reviewer visited Penang State in Malaysia over the weekend, and to his surprise, found that the Malaysia’s first kung fu film, KINTA, featured on ScreenAnarchy in previous postings, had just opened in local theatres. Here’s my review with some (very) minor spoilers. The family names of the various cast and crew are given in capitals.

The titular Kinta refers to a district in the Malaysian state of Perak, which produced massive amounts of tin ore in the 18th and 19th centuries while under British colonial rule. Interestingly, the transliteration of ‘Kinta’ into the Chinese language used characters which literally mean ‘Close Quarters Combat’, an irony evidently not lost on the filmmakers. To work the tin mines, the British required an enormous number of labourers, which they obtained primarily from China. Historians estimated that from 1850 to 1925, 835’000 Southern Han Chinese migrated to the Malay Straits. Some went as free men or women, but many others sold themselves into bondage ‘contracts’, where they earn their freedom by serving as slave labour for a period of time to work off their ‘debts’. Such slaves were colloquially called ‘piggies’, and the bondage practice was referred to as ‘selling piggies’. It is in this setting that we are introduced to the stars of the film, 4 young piggies working for a wealthy but morally-bankrupt Chinese mine owner, Uncle Hoong (a visibly bored Patrick TEOH).

This quartet of blood brothers consists of Lung (Robin HO), Kit (KUAN Jun-Fei), Kwong (David BAO), and Fu (Michael CHIN). All are well-versed in Chinese martial arts, which come into play once Uncle Hoong and his newfound triad business partner decide to slaughter the slaves instead of letting them earn their freedom with their wages. The quartet, along with their foreman, Uncle Tin (Albert YUEN), are the only survivors. Separated and injured, the blood brothers’ back-stories were filled in by the use of flashbacks during their recuperation. The obligatory training montage ensues, followed by the final fight against the bad guys when Uncle Hoong holds a cage fight to select the new foreman for a new batch of piggies.

This was probably all well and good on paper. I don’t know where and when things went wrong. However, I’m pretty sure the film’s director CL HOR likely bears most of the blame. I never watched Hor’s directorial debut, The Third Generation, but let’s get one thing straight off the bat: Hor is incapable of making a coherent film, if Kinta is anything to go by. This is all the more tragic as the cast consists of exceptionally well-trained martial artists whose potentials were entirely wasted by the film’s illogical leaps and prances. Aside from the solid kung fu fights and stunts (choreographed by Hong Kong veteran CHIN Kar-Lok), this film is a mess of inconsistent, pointless scenes held together by very tenuous threads.

The flashbacks, which formed the backbone of the movie, were so poorly edited that you never know whether you are watching events unfold in the present or the past. The resultant bewilderment is acute, and intensified by plotlines which go absolutely nowhere and provide zero insight into the characters. The character of Rose (a luminescent Laura NEW) is utterly and literally pointless.
In a newspaper interview, Hor blames the lack of coherency on the demands of the Western market. He claims that the 7 side stories were trimmed to 3 to accommodate Western audiences. I beg your pardon, Mr Hor. I would expect audiences (either Western or Eastern) to be partial to stories which make sense. Clocking in at only 92 minutes for the final cut, there is plenty of room to include more snipped scenes to save the film. The ending of the film, if it can be called that, is the worst offender. I guess endings which provide resolution simply do not fall within the scope of the director’s talent. There are no satisfying conclusions to any of the plot points. The caste-defying romance between Fu and Hoong’s daughter (dully assayed by Hong Kong actress Anita KWAN) is not resolved. Hoong’s murder of countless slaves is not addressed. A subplot involving Uncle Tin and the father of Kwong is entirely unexplained. The overall tone of the ending is one of complete hopelessness. For all the skill and sacrifices of the protagonists, nothing has changed by the end of the film, save the undeserved death of one character and a poorly-contrived betrayal. And when you consider that the total run time includes almost 10 minutes of scenes which were repeated verbatim as flashbacks, the director’s incompetence quickly swings from annoying to insufferable. I could go on about the fake-looking and unnecessary CG blood, or the over the top, unintentionally hilarious scenes (more on this later), or the anachronistic rock/rap soundtrack, but why bother, at this stage?

The only saving grace, which makes Kinta just barely watchable, is the choreographed fight scenes. All 4 of the blood brothers are played by champions of various martial arts tournaments, as is Hoong’s right hand man, Lam (Shawn LEE). All of them deliver solid fight performances, utilising moves that just can’t be faked by untrained actors. David Bao’s combat Taichi is fascinating, but we don’t really get enough of it. Michael Chin who plays Fu is a young star to keep your eyes on. His obvious skills coupled to his pop idol good looks will drive the teen girls hysterical. Shawn Lee is built like a truck, and terrifyingly ferocious in a fight. However, he is also the source of hilarity in the film, all unfortunately unintentional. It’s not really the poor guy’s fault, as the scenes in question were so terribly written that Dustin Hoffman would probably be unable to save them. Chin Kar-Lok delivers the goods with the choreography, but is often undercut by unclear or poorly-lit photography that mars the visual impact. Fans of Hong Kong veteran actor Mark CHENG Ho-Nam who miss his fighting skills take note: he cameos briefly to kick some arse.

I cannot in good faith recommend Kinta to anyone but hardcore kung fu film enthusiasts. I had hoped that this film would at least do decent justice to the genre, and it being set in my childhood hometown gave me vested interests. I sadly must report that Kinta, in its current cut is a disappointing shadow of a film that betrayed the hopes of a nation, and defiled the expectations of kung fu film-lovers the world over.