6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
After a fight, the school of master Hang Tui has to face the opium dealer Chao and his thugs. After a first defeat, the treacherous Chao hires a bunch of ruthless mercenaries. Tien Lung, Hang Tui's best student, is the only survivor, but without one of his arm. He has to undergo very painful training to exact revenge on evil Chao and his deadly henchmen.
Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu, Yeh Tien, Hsin Tang, Fei LungForeign | 100% |
Drama | 8% |
Action | 4% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Mandarin: LPCM 2.0 Mono
English: LPCM 2.0 Mono
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
One Armed Boxer is so relentlessly busy providing fight scenes every couple of seconds for the bulk of its running time that two kind of odd things happen as a result, as commentator Frank Djeng somewhat humorously jokes about in his enjoyable analysis of the film. The hero of the story, Yu Tien Lung (Jimmy Wang Yu, who also wrote and directed), actually has two arms until well into the running time, and indeed the film's seeming love interest, a woman named Jade (Hsin Tang), isn't introduced until more or less the moment that Yu loses his appendage, which is just a couple of minutes before the one hour mark in a film that barely runs an hour and a half. If that at least is a little unusual, much of the rest of this enterprise is kind of geared toward "lowest common denominator" status in terms of building a plot around two competing schools of martial arts who let things spiral out of control, leading to repeated mayhem and, ultimately, death. Yu of course is a student of the "honorable" school, and is tasked with revenge, though by the time he's able to totally exact it, he is missing one of his arms.
One Armed Boxer is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Arrow's insert booklet contains the following information on the transfer:
One Armed Boxer is presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio [sic] with its original Mandarin and English monaural soundtracks, as well as an alternative Mandarin mono track with different music score. It was restored in 2K resolution from original film elements by Fortune Star, who supplied this master to Arrow Video for this Blu-ray release.Maybe I'm unnecessarily suspicious of things like copyright dates, but at the very end of this presentation we get both a 2010 and 2020 notice, which kind of leads me to believe that at least some part of the workflow that got us to this final product may be at least a couple of years old, and quite possibly older. While there's a lot to enjoy here, especially in a reasonably intact palette, this has quite a bit of damage still on display, as well as less abundant clarity than some other vintage martial arts offerings Arrow has released. That said, there are some undeniable focus pulling problems throughout this presentation, where things are noticeably out of focus (pay attention during the "introduction" sequence of all the global fighters, and it looks like someone mismeasured their "marks" for whatever lens they were using, as evidenced in screenshot 9). While there does seem to be a bit of fade, as evidenced by slightly brown flesh tones and the like, on the whole the palette reproduction is probably one of this transfer's assets. Close-ups can offer good fine detail levels. Grain generally resolves naturally, with a few errant spikes on display.
One Armed Boxer features two different Mandarin tracks and an English track, all in DTS-HD Master Audio Mono. One of the film's unavoidably hilarious aspects for Western viewers is going to be its use of a certain iconic Oscar winning score from a 1970s film classic that may have some viewers chiming in with a hearty, "Who's the Chinese private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks? Yu!" That right, the first of the two Mandarin tracks steals copiously from Isaac Hayes' score to Shaft, including some frankly abysmally edited cues that are just shoehorned into things with absolutely no rhyme or reason. Even the secondary Mandarin track, while not quite as overt in its "borrowing", has some Hayes cues. All three tracks suffer from a really brittle high end, which can make the music in particular crackle and distort. Dialogue manages to escape the ravages of time and tide relatively well. Optional English subtitles are available.
- HK Theatrical Trailer (HD*; 4:13)
- US TV Spot (HD*; 1:04)
- US Radio Spot (HD; 1:00) plays to a black screen.
- Wang Yu Trailer Reel (HD*; 34:29)
The back cover of this release mentions how former Shaw Brothers executive Raymond Chow founded Golden Harvest in 1970, he wasted little time in recruiting Jimmy Wang Yu, and it's obvious Chow and Yu wanted to fashion an easily accessible entertainment that had what brought fans to Shaw Brothers epics in droves, namely lots of action. Structurally, One Armed Boxer is perhaps understandably a little lopsided, and if its underlying plot premise is more than familiar, the action is so relentless that few will probably care. Technical merits are decent if improvable, but as usual Arrow has aggregated some really appealing supplements, for anyone who may be considering making a purchase.
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