“Progressively struggles to justify its artificially engineered dictum of moral restraint.”

Modernity is often a confusing term. Loaded, to say the least, with conflicting definitions of progress and tradition, it is the fulcrum of production for almost all art today, but also the very thing being sworn against by it. The attempt to integrate AI into artistic projects, to find spaces and uses for its co-optation and co-conspiracies, represents one such conflict, as does an equally reactionary rejection of the end times in pursuit of a pristine, originary state of affairs. Measured against these struggles, the wuxia genre appears to have comfortably processed modernity’s dialectic in an uncanny show of cannibalisation: witness, for example,  the recent rollout of ByteDance’s new AI model, whose technical heft and geopolitical import would undoubtedly go into iterating present and future narratives of imperial Chinese folklore and fantasy.

But wuxia predates modernity by thousands of years, leading us to these two questions: how does it gel so well with modernity? And whose modernity? The answer to the latter question anticipates the former, for the heroic and romantic undercurrents of each epoch arguably stem from their prevailing ruptures of change and violence. Every period is relatively modern; our current cycle, as a rule of thumb, thus rallies against an order whose universal principles are time and again revealed through sweeping institutions and subversions of power. Such is the materialist reading of history, which the world of wuxia and its mythic jianghu environs may broadly skirt in favour of an ahistorical template of morality. It is precisely this template, fêted by fabulists, that sketches the contemporary landscapes of Shao Pan’s Nangong Cheng. A sprawling martial arts epic set between the industrialised greyscale of China’s urban districts and the heightened yellows and whites of rural neighbouring Myanmar, Nangong Cheng might position itself as a tale of two modernities, each rife with corruption and serving as an impermanent salve for the other. It is also a shockingly vacuous and lethargic work.

Shao’s narrative debut (after 2013’s documentary Bike and Old Electric Piano) opens with a scene of brutal assault as masked men storm the village abode of Zhuang Kewen (Lu Li) and paralyse him. His wife is raped and subsequently murdered, and six years later a sickly Zhuang has journeyed across the vast expanse of China to Xuzhou, where he implores Lan (Li Yue), a practitioner of an unnamed kung fu sect, to cure his paralysis and avenge his wife. The kung fu sect specialises in acupuncture healing, with its members largely renouncing overt conflict of any kind. But Lan’s old master is dead; in his stead, Nangong Cheng (played by Shao) is summoned. Toiling away at a steel factory and nursing a gangrenous stomach wound himself, Cheng is close to death’s door, yet agrees to aid Zhuang as a matter of honour, or principle, or both.

Menggui, the village that Zhuang hails from (and eventually returns to), sits at the Myanmar-Chinese border, its locale disingenuously presented as Southeast Asia in the film’s opening titles. By way of lore, Zhuang reveals his ancestors to have been vassals of the Ming Emperor, and his ethnic and cultural associations to Chinese fiefdom are therefore uncontested. What’s being challenged, however, are Menggui’s territory and more broadly the legitimacy of martial arts proper, as bandits and warring drug lords fiendishly carve out land and coerce its inhabitants into swearing allegiance. As Cheng and Lan pursue an elusive Zhuang back to his devastated hometown, encountering conniving and unscrupulous officials on that side of the border, Nangong Cheng’s schematic themes become wrought large on a canvas of ill faith and idiocy. Cheng refuses to retaliate point-blank; his principled morals do not extend, curiously, to dishing out money to these officials in pursuit of his life’s singular mission or to doing anything particularly heroic in the most critical hours of crisis. His warring abilities are, for the most part, unquestioned. The inner battle he fights, instead, is one of utter stubbornness and feigned helplessness.

Consequently, the film revels in victimhood and hawks the revered currency of rage bait. There is something notable about how it does so, for Nangong Cheng exploits the overarching miasma of injustice in service of its propagandist aims. A frequently Sinocentric work decrying the startling turpitude of China’s lawless periphery, the film brandishes its pathetic conceit to expound on its caricatures of the cartoonishly evil — yet somehow omnipotent — law enforcement that oversees and undermines Cheng’s efforts to investigate the spate of deaths that follows his arrival in Zhuang’s village. Even when Nona (Yu Bolai), a principled state prosecutor, arrives to uncover a deeper political conspiracy, her just overtures continue to be resisted by Cheng’s bumbling inertia. His character is a quintessential member of the armchair intelligentsia, attuned to observation and keen detective work but rarely able to respond in kind. 

With the local mafia themselves wielding the power of acupuncture for the nefarious purposes of murder and intimidation, Nangong Cheng progressively struggles to justify its artificially engineered dictum of moral restraint. It comes close initially to a more intelligent interpretation of wuxia’s continued relevance in a doggedly unheroic world, cross-cutting between characters and sequences in a tantalising fever dream. Regrettably, Shao stages all the motions of wuxia with none of its charisma or force, and the result is a narrative catastrophe as inane as its length is impressive and, for its better half, grossly insubstantial.