★★★
“Lin-sanity rides once again.”
I am going to be entirely upfront, and state that any factual statements regarding the plot here will be entirely cribbed from other sources. Because, on my own, I have close to no clue as to the details of what was going. I got that some girl dressed as a guy, Little Flying Dragon (Lin, inevitably) was trying to protect Golden Boy (Chan) from a bunch of very strangely dressed weirdos with even more bizarre powers. They want Golden Boy for some nefarious purpose on behalf of an evil sorcerer type, who laughs maniacally. A lot. Everyone involved wears wigs which look like they were bought in bulk from Hair Metal R Us. There’s an acid pit, into which Golden Boy’s father is unceremoniously dropped. His mother is called “Evil Lady” in the subtitles, though she isn’t really. At one point, there’s a song whose lyrics according to the subs go, “Little Flying Dragon, Little Flying Dragon, change all the time, power breads everything.”
You will understand my confusion.
Actually, I’m not going to bother with a more coherent description of the plot elements, because in the final analysis, they don’t particularly matter. It’d be like spending 500 words discussing background to the 1998 Hell in a Cell match, when what actually counts, is Mankind getting thrown off the cage and through a table. Any story here is simply an excuse for the usual combination of high-flying action and low-brow humour. We’ve seen them present in earlier, similar Lin-powered entries such as Magic of Spell, yet it feels like the makers felt the need to one-up themselves here, in both departments. The kung-fu feels more well-assembled and, though still significantly wire-powered, there’s clearly no shortage of skill from the performers. On the other hand, you get a steady stream of jokes about urine, farts and excrement: Golden Boy seems to have got his name from the first of these. If you find someone mistaking pee for tea the peak of comedy, you’re going to love this.
Me, not so much, and again, I find myself unable to figure out the target audience here. For every element which seems squarely targeted at a nine-year-old audience, there’s one which seems heavily inappropriate, such as Evil Lady projectile vomiting blood into a lake. Maybe the Taiwanese pre-teen audience is just considerably more resilient? It’s still not quite my cup of tea (or pee, I guess), with the more childish elements not to my taste. However, I think I did enjoy this one a bit more than Spell, with what felt like better pacing and a particularly rousing finale in the villain’s lair. I’d not be willing to take a test on the plot, what with people changing sides at the drop of a small child. Yet this is one of those cases where you simply need to, in the words of the great philosopher Adele, “Let it go, let it go…”
Dir: Yan-Chien Chuang, Tso Nam Lee
Star: Hsiao-Lao Lin, Chan Yin-Yu, Alexander Lo Rei, Chen Shan