Telling the story of real-life prizefighter Hou YuanJia, the first half predominantly concerns itself with Hou’s rise to the top in the early 20th century despite a childhood plagued with asthma and a father (an excellent Ngai Sing) who wants to keep his son away from the art. His father is a master of Wu Shu and shows his craft at local duels, which prove to be brutal affairs where the combatants are required to sign “death waivers” to absolve the organisers of blame in case anything goes wrong. It is into this environment that Hou finds himself drawn, and he eventually follows in his father’s footsteps to become the “Hero of Tianjin”.

The central character is quite weighty for an action movie, and Jet Li pulls it off well. Hou turns into an arrogant drunken thug after his success and then has to deal with a cripplingly tragic event in his life. The latter half of the film deals with Hou’s inevitable rehabilitation and his quest for redemption, rather than revenge, armed with his newborn humility. Throughout, Li plays it without sinking into melodramatics, much to his credit.

The duels and challenges are shot in typical Jet Li style, with lots of wirework and with a leaning towards the more fantastic. Thankfully, there is not an over-reliance on CGI in the actual fighting sections of the film, which is what I was most concerned about. Actually, sometimes Fearless has an almost “dated” feel to it – and I mean that in a largely complimentary way. I do, however, feel that a film based on a real-life hero should have perhaps been approached in a more realistic way, but that’s a minor gripe. Besides, you could, at a push, say the same about Once Upon a Time in China. I will admit, though, that the fight scenes did not always excite me, or elicit any kind of emotional response from me at times. This happens to me fairly regularly with films choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping for some reason, and I’m not really able to identify why. And there’s plenty of his films I like, too.

Of course, this story has been told before and a lot of people will know how it’s all going to end up, but that’s not the point. And while I didn’t enjoy Fearless as much as practically everyone else who’s seen it, I can still see that it’s a well thought out film and probably worthy of most of the praise heaped upon it.