Director – XianFeng Zhang, Action Director – Shu Jian, Screenplay – Liu Hua, Producers – Sylen Hwa, Wu Hao & Xu Lei, Photography Director – Chen Zheng Feng, Visual Effects Director – Peter Riel, Visual Effects Supervisor – Gerald Lim, Art Direction – Li Dapeng. Production Company – KungFuMan Culture Media (Beijing) Limited.
Cast
Tiger Chen (Chen Hu/A Jie), Wang Zhi (Xu Zi Ying), Yang Zhe (Zhou Chen Ling), Liu Yi Lin/Xiao Tang Yuan (Ni Hu Liu), Shaneg Gang (Big Brother), Ye Yun Fei (Zhou Xiao Hua), Du Hong Jun (General Feng)
Plot
In the year 2147, Earth is under invasion by aliens. Humanity is crushed apart from one last holdout in Western China. Only one person has been able to defeat an alien, the soldier Chen Hu. It is decided that the only hope for humanity is to send A Jie, an android duplicate of Chen Hu, back in time to 1885 so that he can find the martial arts master Zhou Chen Ling and learn the lost art of southern kung fu from him. The mission is a one-way one and at the last minute Chen Hu’s wife Xu Zi Ying decides to go too. They arrive in the 19th Century and locate Zhou, only to find that he adamantly refuses to take on a new apprentice after his previous one died on the battlefield. A Jie attempts to appeal to Zhou and then his daughter Xiao Hua. The mission is threatened as the alien forces arrive in this time too.
There are not many science-fiction films to have emerged from China. In genre material, there are plentiful Wu Xia fantasies, ghost stories and assorted thrillers but not much has emerged from the science-fiction genre. That started to change in the late 2010s/early 2020s with the likes of Gone with the Night (2019), Shanghai Fortress (2019), The Wandering Earth (2019) and sequel, Restart the Earth (2021), The Underground War (2021), Moon Man (2022), Mutant Ghost Wargirl (2022), Star Abyss (2024) and the tv series The Three-Body Problem (2023- ). (See Chinese Cinema).
The plotting in Kung Fu Traveler is frankly bizarre. Tiger Chen is the sole soldier who has defeated an alien so an android duplicate is made in his likeness on the grounds that he would be most frightening to the aliens (even though the android is to be sent back in time before the aliens’ arrival – the logic here escapes me). Just as the time travel mission is about to be launched, Wang Zhi, the wife of soldier Tiger, elects to jump in alongside knowing that this is a one-way trip – her marriage to the soldier Tiger must have reallly being going through a difficult patch to make such an impulsive and irreversible decision. And quite why an obscure form of martial arts that has been long dead is seen as the only means to defeat the aliens is not at all clear either.
Mostly though, there is zero believability to the set-up whereby you send an android back to the 19th Century to learn kung fu to defeat an alien invasion. What Kung Fu Traveler ends up resembling is something akin to The Terminator (1984) – albeit where the android is the hero of the show – by way of a Shaw Brothers Martial Arts film or a Wu Xia film. Once the film arrives back in the 19th Century, it largely abandons the alien invasion altogether and just becomes a standard martial arts film that trades in characters familiar to the genre – the harsh sensei, the girlish love interest, the rival gone over to the dark side.
Tiger Chen in action
One of the major negatives of Kung Fu Traveler is Tiger Chen, who has a background as martial artist and stunt double. Though born in China, most of Chen’s work was in the US, including stunt work on The Matrix and Kill Bill films, before returning to China to star here. Chen is a completely blank presence as an actor – he is someone who makes Jet Li seem like a Shakespearean actor. Moreover, he comes with features where his eyes seem set too close together, giving him a slightly cross-eyed and a perpetually peeved expression as though he finds everyone around him incompetent and failing to meet his standards while remaining tight-lipped about it.
The action and martial arts scenes are surprisingly forgettable for a film that comes with the word ‘kung fu’ in the title. There are some scenes going into battle with the alien robots in the opening scenes that are passable but nothing great – they look exactly like something out of a videogame – while a slow-motion fight in the rain looks like a sequence that might have been cut from one of The Matrix sequels.
Kung Fu Traveler 2 (2017) was a sequel also starring Tiger Chen.
