100 Yards

“100 Yards neatly deviates from its more jingoistic peers by painting a slightly nuanced picture of a global port city in the 1920s.”

Title: 100 Yards (2023) / Chinese: 門前寶地
Directors: Xu Haofeng 👨🏻🇨🇳 and Xu Junfeng 👨🏻🇨🇳
Writer: Xu Haofeng 👨🏻🇨🇳

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 2.5/5

Director Xu Haofeng is no newcomer to the moviemaking scene. With four kung fu films under his belt, and screenwriting credits that boast Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster (2013), Xu Haofeng teams up with co-director Xu Junfeng—for whom this is a feature debut—and premiered their wushu caper 100 Yards at Toronto International Film Festival earlier this week.

But what begins with a swaggering bang quickly devolves into repetitive one-upmanship, as Tianjin martial arts academy leader Qi Quan (Andy On) and his junior, Shen An (Jacky Heung), fight again and again. Just how many rematches can a movie cram into 1 hour and 48 minutes? And does an endless series of duels between the same two characters actually make for an interesting movie? The answer is, sadly, no.

Throw in a tangle of betrothals and romances, and a whole lot of dead air between posturing gangs of slingshot-wielding cowboys and French Westerners (who speak really, really bad French), 100 Yards falls woefully short of its promise. It’s too bad, since the fight choreography is spot-on—electric and snappy, often a wonder to behold. In the film’s best sequence, wushu daughter Gui Ying (Tang Shiyi) gets ambushed in a locker room by hordes of baddies and breathlessly fends them off with feral grace while trying to get dressed. The scene somehow winks its way into a Wes Anderson-style faceoff against Qi Quan, as the two uncannily centered characters fight their way across an elegant set.

This creative panache shows flashes of genius. A loose camera lurches and roves, pausing occasionally at drunken Dutch angles. All the while, the soundtrack hums along to a lazy harmonica and uses other nods to spaghetti Westerns—pugnacious men in three-piece suits, dusty streets, and a sepia filter—to create a refreshing vibe for a kung fu movie. But style and action alone don’t make a story; 100 Yards never coheres into anything more.

Gender: 2.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Women have several supporting roles and display moderate usefulness, but they play second fiddle to the film’s main adversaries of Qi Quan and Shen An. Shen An’s love interest, Xia An (Bea Hayden Kuo, who incidentally is married to Shen An’s actor in real life), falls into cliche as a wiley woman who uses her ethereal beauty as a weapon. She manipulates men but still relies on them—in this case, on her largely absent French father—to have any type of onscreen empowerment.

Even Gui Ying, who comes from a wushu family and inherits a fighting technique coveted by Qi Quan and Shen An, is just strong enough to be desirable, but never an actual threat. She’s coerced into a marriage with Qi Quan, who sicced a gang of fighters after her and then locked her up in order to prevent anyone from learning her family’s secret fighting technique. Yet in perhaps the most telling indicator that this script was written by a man, Gui Ying inexplicably takes a blade for Qi Quan, saving his life and nearly getting killed in the process.

Worst of all, the film does a huge disservice to the intriguing character of Chairman Meng (Li Yuan). A dapper woman who wears mens’ clothing, Meng expertly maneuvers within academy politics and maintains decorum among the leaders of the “wushu circle.” But less than a half hour into the film, she’s shot from nowhere and dramatically bleeds out. With her dying breath she says "this society doesn't allow women to excel.” It’s a damned shame that 100 Yards doesn’t either.

Race: 5/5

100 Yards is a Chinese film starring mostly actors of Chinese or Taiwanese descent. Furthermore, it neatly deviates from its more jingoistic peers—I’m looking at you, Ip Man 4 (2019)—by painting a slightly nuanced picture of a global port city in the 1920s. An early title card describes the film’s setting of Tianjin as “filled with music and dance halls,” and that sense of jazz age modernization is reflected through a bit more racial diversity than we’re used to seeing in kung fu films. White French characters, white English-speaking bankers, and a glimpse of a turbaned South Asian domestic worker appear throughout the film, and not all expats are treated as cartoon villains.

In particular, Xia An plays a biracial character who’s fully aware of her status as someone who can never fit into Tianjin’s Chinese populace, nor its white communities. She’s forced to take the only gig that readily accepts multiracial workers—the post office—while simultaneously relying on her white father’s wealth, which comes with strings attached. As Xia An recounts her difficulties to Shen An, 100 Yards makes an effort to recognize the racial diversity that exists within major port cities like Tianjin.

Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.42/5

Despite wonderful fight choreography, compelling female characters, and flashes of creative brilliance, 100 Yards belly flops into a quagmire of two dull main characters and indulges mens’ outsized egos.

Like 100 Yards? Try these other titles with martial arts action.

*Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)*

Grade: CLiSeptember 14, 2023Great for: Race