‘100 Yards’ Review: ‘The Grandmaster’ Screenwriter Xu Haofeng Delivers a Blazingly Elegant Martial Arts Epic of His Own

Andy On and Jacky Heung duel for control of a martial arts academy in this shapeless but shimmering riff on classic genre tropes.

Blazing fast combat. Pronounced tension between tradition and modernity. Sound effects so intense that several foley artists probably died of exhaustion. A fight to inherit a famous martial arts academy, galvanized by a mutual obsession over the late master’s unbeatable secret technique. “100 Yards” is nothing if not a classic martial arts movie, and yet this bruising story about turn-of-the-century Tianjin — co-directed by Xu Haofeng, who previously scripted Wong Kar Wai’s “The Grandmaster” — has been shot and staged with such radical elegance that it seems less like a throwback than it does the pursuit of a new form. It’s a form this film is only able to achieve at the cost of its soul, as Xu and his brother Xu Junfeng struggle to sustain any of what makes their initial premise so compelling, but the moments when “100 Yards” lands its blows are exhilarating in a way that makes the movie feel miles removed from most of its competition. 

Speed is the name of the game from the minute that “100 Yards” begins, and that’s as true of its pacing as it is of its punches. The year is 1920, and the city of Tianjin — at the forefront of China’s push toward Westernization in the wake of the Eight-Nation Alliance — is policed by a network of kung fu academies that attend to any civil disorder within 100 yards of their doors. Xu Haofeng’s script doesn’t belabor the friction between native institutions and foreign investments (though French bankers play a large factor in this story), but it’s clear that Tianjin’s martial arts schools are struggling to maintain their place in a city that’s being rapidly transformed by guns, dance halls, and three-piece suits. 

That’s especially true of the school run by the ailing Master Shen (Guo Long), who summons his star pupil and his wayward son to duel for the academy’s future while he watches from his deathbed. The apprentice, Qi Quan (Andy On), is seen as the heir apparent, partly because of his skill, and partly because Master Shen has never wanted his son Shen An (Jacky Heung) to spend his life in “the circle,” or perhaps never believed that his son could survive there. Master Shen has taken great pains for An to become a banker, so as to better position himself for the world to come, but An — who only measures his value in terms of martial arts — is determined to prove that he’s a fighter worthy of his father. The last thing Master Shen sees before his eyes close for the last time is Quan knocking An unconscious in about two seconds flat. 

An buries his father, becomes a banker, and he and Quan both live happily ever after for the next 100 minutes. Well, at least the first two of those things happen, anyway, as An takes a 9-to-5 job working for some Frenchmen who see him as a novelty and force him to fight during work hours for their own amusement; if martial arts were seen as vulgar before the academies opened, foreigners have now contorted them into something of a celebrity spectacle.

Alas, that doesn’t matter to An, who only cares about challenging Quan to a rematch (maybe with sharper blades this time). And while the real world might have a knack for intruding on such myopic pissing contests, neither this film nor its characters seem to care. A setup poised to explore the role of martial arts in a modernizing China soon descends into a petty squabble that doesn’t appear to have any serious implications for the more historic matters at hand.

That solipsism doesn’t always square with the dourness of the movie’s lighting, but it enhances the snow-globe feeling of its super fake sets, and works to the Xu brothers’ advantage whenever they lean into the spaghetti Eastern flavors of their story (An Wei’s otherwise shimmering score is ribboned with harmonica solos that breeze across the soundtrack at all the right times). To that end, “100 Yards” thrives during its many different ambushes and stand-offs. The fights are frequent and unpredictable, while their choreography is so fast that you can practically feel each phantom punch whooshing past your head. 

Rather than emphasizing the impact of each move with their edit, the Xu brothers prefer to stand back and admire the action for its speed. Every block and kick reveals a lifetime of training from the film’s characters and its cast alike, as the film’s (often music-less) combat sequences are broken into an interconnecting series of wide shots that suffuse the film’s latent emotion through stiff but highly precise strikes that locate the setpieces somewhere between the Shaw Brothers and Pina Bausch. 

The expressiveness of that approach befits the general bloodlessness of a story in which most of the deaths are random, and martial arts is maintained as the noblest way to solve disputes in a century that’s growing more callous by the minute; the camera swoops around the characters like a falcon whenever they aren’t moving, enhancing the impression of a chaotic world that can only be settled by the calm of organized combat. At the same time, however, that approach only serves to underline the purpose of every scrap, and so the fights begin to lose their sense of personal velocity as the film’s plot starts to fray at the seams (an unraveling that stings worst during the climactic brawl, an epic showdown that feels a bit less satisfying with every blow to the head). 

It’s especially frustrating that “100 Yards” should amount to so much less than the sum of its parts, as its story is dripping with juicy subplots that it never bothers to wring dry. The best involves an almost love triangle between An, the ass-kicking schoolteacher he seemed fated to marry (a spellbinding Tang Shiyi as Gui Ying, who anchors the film’s best fight scene), and the beautiful socialite he’s actually in love with (Bea Hayden Kuo as Xia An, the illegitimate daughter of the biggest French banker in town). Meanwhile, Quan and Gui Ying get locked in a flirtatious tussle because the former is convinced that his rival’s childhood crush knows the secret form needed to defeat him. 

In broad strokes, these criss-crossing dynamics add some much-needed texture to the film’s central dilemma: How far should the limits of Master Shen’s academy extend into the real world, and to what degree should those separate worlds be allowed to intermingle? But the patchiness of Xu’s script prevents these subplots from establishing any meaningful overlap. If anything, they only further confuse the film’s already tenuous grasp on its two main characters, making it hard to understand how An — initially coded as a sniveling nepo baby — is meant to emerge as the hero, or why Quan makes a heel turn towards becoming the closest thing this story has to an antagonist. 

Hardly a simple matter of right vs. wrong, the conflict between An and Quan is ultimately less interested in “good” and “bad” than it is in pushing these two very different men to reconcile the lives they imagined for themselves with the realities of the world they stand to inherit. “You’re a man, invent your own form,” Quan is scolded as he searches for Master Shen’s secret move set as if it were the lost gold of El Dorado. The only character who credibly does that — and by far the highlight of the movie, however brief her appearance — isn’t a man at all, but rather Master Shen’s dashingly chic second-in-command Chairman Meng (Li Yuan), whose sage-like poise and devastating sense of style make her feel like a vision of the future that Quan and An struggle to see beyond their squabble with each other.

“100 Yards” embodies that myopia in a way that often obscures the big picture, but the sheer pleasure of watching its characters fight against their own foibles allows this shimmering curio of an action movie to make good on the last thing Chairman Meng says before leaving it: “Martial arts are still of great use.” When they’re performed as elegantly as they are here, it’s easy to feel like they always will be.

Grade: B-

Well GO USA will release “100 Yards” in theaters on Friday, November 8.

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