Call of Heroes Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Call of Heroes Blu-ray Movie Review

You might want to answer this 'Call'.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 6, 2016

Jackie Chan had one of his most memorable and even iconic roles as the titular inebriant in The Legend of Drunken Master. Eddie Peng’s character in Call of Heroes might be able to spin off into his own series which could conceivably be called The Legend of Food Coma Master, for that’s the state the wandering martial arts maven is in when he’s first seen early in the film, literally passed out at a village cafe table after having ingested a huge lunch. Before that happens, though, Call of Heroes has already detailed the efforts of a concerned teacher to get a gaggle of incredibly sweet if terrified kids away from incursions by a warlord made in the wake of the crumbling of the Qing Dynasty in 1914. The teacher gets her brood to that aforementioned cafe, and tells them all to be brave, despite the fact that they’re obviously distraught at being torn from their hometown and away from their families. Things seem to be calming down, with a big bowl of noodles that everyone can share, until some bad guys stand up and inform everyone that there is in fact a robbery taking place. That’s when one of the dunderheaded villains goes over to wake up Ma Feng (Eddie Peng), who is unconscious at a side table. Wrong move, villain, as any fan of martial arts films will probably be able to predict. Once Ma Feng is awakened, all hell breaks loose, with the would be robbers nicely vanquished, the kids in awe of their new hero whom they dub Monkey King, and the teacher with stars in her eyes over what would seem to be the perfect set up for a nascent romance down the narrative road. But Call of Heroes has a few surprises up its elegant silk sleeve, and in fact the blatantly humorous introduction of Ma Feng (as well as some other humorous bits that are sprinkled throughout the film in the later going) are actually a bit of misdirection, for the film has some unabashedly dark and even shocking developments in store.

When the teacher, her kids, and Ma Feng all show up in a little village called Pucheng, it appears that Call of Heroes is going to follow standard genre tropes, especially after the teacher asks Ma to help her get the kids to safety in the capital city. The village has already been shown to be a bit vacillating in terms of accepting refugees from the surrounding mayhem, but the local sheriff, Yang (Sean Lau), reminds them that many of them were refugees not so long ago, and that the village welcomed them with open arms. The teacher reveals that she was able to spirit the kids out of her school’s back window when a vicious warlord named Cao (Louis Koo) showed up and simply began slaughtering everyone in sight, including other children.

So far this outing, one which received incredible hype in the Asian market for its gaggle of stars both on screen and behind the camera, seems to be content to offer some lighthearted entertainment with an expected narrative course and (of course) some spectacular fight scenes. But Call of Heroes then exploits a frankly incredibly shocking scene that won’t be spoiled here other than to say it comes more or less completely out of the blue and sets everything on a much darker course. It revolves around Cao showing up in Pucheng, with considerable havoc being wreaked, and Cao quickly jailed, and in fact sentenced to death. There’s therefore not just the shocking developments that will go unmentioned in this review, but the unusual development of having the bad guy in custody pretty early in the film. What exactly is going on?

It turns out that Call of Heroes actually has more on its mind than stunning wire work and the crazy antics of a lone vigilante. The film, much like some legendary Kurosawa epics of yore, obviously wants to meld aspects of the western with historical elements culled from China’s own past, and it’s rather notable that it manages to do so in an artful way which is quite different from Kurosawa’s approach. This is a somewhat glossier and, yes, occasionally sillier take on the subject matter, but there are some very Kurosawian perspectives at play, especially when Cao’s jailing leads to a whole host of new moral dilemmas for the sheriff and indeed all of the townspeople of Pucheng.

While Call of Heroes is rather thoughtful for a wuxia film, there’s been no shirking from the action adventure elements that draw fans to the genre. The film’s spectacular fight choreography by genre master Sammo Hung is exciting if often whimsical, and the film also makes use of some nicely wrought physical production design which brings both Pucheng and some of the surrounding countryside realistically to life. This is a story which, kind of like a drunken master, lurches pretty violently from humor to shocking violence. It’s all the more amazing that, cinematically speaking, director Benny Chan manages to keep everything upright.

Call of Heroes Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Call of Heroes is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. The IMDb lists this as having been shot at various source resolutions with the Red Epic Dragon, and then finished at a 2K DI. A Go Pro HD was evidently used for some sequences, and my hunch would be some quick flashback scenes that are noticeably less detailed than the bulk of the presentation (see screenshot 6), though perhaps some of the aerial work was done this way as well. This is a really nice looking transfer which boasts uniformly excellent detail levels across the board, with a couple of minor exceptions in some dark sequences that take place later in the film, some of which have been lit and/or graded to either blue or yellow sides of the spectrum. Close-ups offer really nice levels of fine detail, but even midrange shots reveal things like random splinters sticking out of wood sets or flyaway hairs on various actors. The palette is varied, though many of the costumes are not especially colorful, and indeed Cao uncharacteristically for a bad guy is clad entirely in white.

Call of Heroes Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kind of interestingly, Call of Heroes features both Cantonese and Mandarin tracks in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (as well as Dolby Digital 2.0). There's no appreciable difference in the general mixes between the two languages, and in fact it seems to my untrained ears (but fairly observant eyes) that the only real difference is which actors were post looped in which language. Otherwise, dialogue, effects and score are all mixed smartly, and there's some great surround activity in several of the fight sequences, as well as in the general hubbub of "downtown" Pucheng. Fidelity is fine and dynamic range wide on these problem free tracks.

Call of Heroes Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of offers several brief featurettes focusing on those associated with the production or elements like production design:

  Pucheng City (1080i; 1:26)

  Eddie Peng (1080i; 1:28)

  Wu Jing (1080i; 3:09)

  Wu Jing & Eddie Peng (1080i; 1:44)

  Louis Koo (1080i; 2:52)

  Sammo Hung (1080i; 1:27)

  Sammo & Sammy Hung (1080i; 1:58)

  Sean Lau (1080i; 1:46)

• Trailer (1080p; 1:42)

As is usual with Well Go USA releases, the supplements have all been authored to automatically follow each other, with trailers for other Well Go USA releases following the trailer for this film.

Call of Heroes Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I am an inveterate guesser of "what's coming next" in a lot of films (as my wife will attest), but I have to say I did not expect an absolutely devastating turn of events early in Call of Heroes which immediately yanked the film out of its quasi-comedic ambience into something much darker and more nuanced. Martial arts fans will in fact get their fill of some great action in Call of Heroes, but there are some interesting moral and philosophical ruminations echoing through this outing which elevates it above many more standard wuxia entries. Technical merits are strong, and Call of Heroes comes Highly recommended.