MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* I held out hopes for ONE FOOT CRANE to be better than average. I've often appreciated the kung-fu roles of Lily Li, though as it happens, I've usually seen her in secondary parts. And for the first thirty minutes of CRANE, the movie makes her character of Fung a good standard avenger-type. When Fung was a small girl, her magistrate father was tasked with arresting a quartet of killers. Who did the killers kill, and why did said killers kill? No reasons are proffered, but the four murderers resent being targeted, so they show up at the magistrate's house and murder everyone there. Fung and her brother escape, though we don't find about the brother's escape until much later. Fung is taken in by a Shaolin monk or some reasonable facsimile and trained in crane-style kung fu. As an adult she decides to track down the killers and execute them. She's such a badass that when she investigates a martial arts dojo, some a-hole throws knives at her, and she bats them away so that they all impale themselves in a conveniently placed target board-- in the center, of course.
However, after various fair-to-middling fights, Fung kills the second of her quarries, but he manages to poison her. She wanders into a forest and meets a complete stanger, who gives her an antidote and takes her to a nearby farmhouse to recover. While Fung is there, the farmer there falls in love with her, though Fung's feelings toward him are ambivalent. The stranger shows up again, as does Fung's grown brother, though she has to convince the latter that they are related. I think the stranger is some sort of Chinese marshal, but not sure. Fung also becomes a lot less cool and much more emotional, though the confused script is probably to blame for the shifts in tone. The two men, who are schooled, respectively, in Mantis and Eagle styles, join with Fung's Crane-fu to take down all the villains. Oh, snd the innocent farmer dies, thus furnishing a very bathetic finish. Though some of the fights are worth watching, nothing stands out. The one "diabolical device" here appears when an attacker jumps at Fung, and she kills him by running him through with-- a spike that emerges from the bottom of her shoe? Maybe that's the real reason she learned "one foot crane." I know if I had to walk around in one shoe fitted with a collapsible spike, I might find myself using only "one foot" to get around.
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