Well, we know what a chopsocky fetish the Wu-Tang Clan leader has, with repeated samples from the films on their tracks, the group calling the Staten Island of their origin Shaolin and even releasing a kung-fu video game featuring the lot of them. Sure enough, then, that The Man with the Iron Fists crams in every possible homage to/plundering of the Hong Kong originals (it even features a cameo from Gordon Liu, for Christ's sake), particularly those of the Shaw Brothers Studio. This proves both shamelessly stupid fun and a lazy approach to putting together a film, with the wire-work action virtually non-stop and the cartoon violence pumped up to the max. The off-the-shelf plot (RZA is a devout weapons maker, Russell Crowe the incongruous, scenery-chewing interest for English audiences, Lucy Liu a brothel madam and Rick Yune - as someone has to be - is out to avenge his father's murder) serves really just as something to hang the ridiculously choreographed mutilation on. But genre fans will still like the reference-spotting.
4/10
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