Dragon

Harvey Weinstein’s company snapped up this martial arts thriller (its Chinese title is ‘Wu Xia’) at Cannes in 2011 – presumably with the masterplan of selling it to international audiences as a crossover hit along the lines of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. And you can see why. The reviews were glowing: ‘“Colombo” meets “CSI”” was the verdict of trade paper The Hollywood Reporter. ‘Channelling David Cronenberg's “A History of Violence” by way of 1917 China’ wrote Variety. Directed by Peter Ho Sun Chan (‘The Warlords’), ‘Dragon’ is set in a remote village, where a pair of bandits rob a grocery shop. A local craftsman (Donnie Yen) steps in and saves the shopkeeper with what look like expert kung fu skills. A lucky fluke, he says, but a local detective Xu Baijiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is suspicious that this mild-mannered guy is a member of a vicious clan in hiding. During that Cannes spending spree, Weinstein also picked up a little French film called ‘The Artist’ – which perhaps helps to explain why ‘Dragon’ has been sitting on the shelf for the best part of two years.