PATRIOT IN WOLF’S CLOTHING

Though only in his early 40s, Wu Jing, di- rector and hero of China’s top-grossing fi lm Wolf Warrior II, has white hair. The 270-day-long grueling shooting for the fi lm aged the kungfu star.

Wolf Warrior II , mainly inspired by the evacu- ation of Chinese from Libya in 2011, revolves around a fictitious former operative of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) special forces, Leng Feng, and his one-man mission to save both Chinese and locals from armed coup plotters and mercenaries in an unspecified African country.

The film claims several firsts in the world, including the fi rst protracted single shot under- water lasting 160 seconds without any cuts, which nearly led to Wu drowning and the first tank-skidding scene ever, for which he learned how to drive a tank in a real PLA special forces camp. Establishing the trend of military-themed action fi lms in China, it cost every penny in Wu’s savings.

But now all that labor is paying off. Wolf Warrior II raked in 5.2 billion yuan ($780.4 mil- lion) 28 days after it was released on July 27. It’s also listed among the world’s 100 highest- grossing fi lms on Boxoffi cemojo.com, the only non-Hollywood blockbuster to be in the list. Over 140 million moviegoers have watched it in less than a month, making it the most watched fi lm in a single territory.

Wu credits the success to luck. “When a fi lm or drama becomes a phenomenon, it’s because of luck, not because of the creator,” he said. But that’s not an accurate picture.

“Wolf Warrior II is a sincere fi lm. I can feel the production team’s efforts through its visual effects,” Chen Siqin, an assistant re- search fellow with Beijing Film Academy, told Beijing Review.

Waiting for his era

The film has transformed Wu into a super kungfu star and an A-list director in China. Wu, born into a martial arts-practicing family in Beijing in 1974, won six martial art national championships before entering the entertain- ment world. Though he played the lead in dozens of kungfu films and TV dramas since 1995, he failed to rise to fame like his fellow ac- tor Jet Li, an acclaimed kungfu star and hero of Zhang Yimou’s 2002 hit fi lm Hero.

“Every martial artist wants to usher in his or her own action era,” Wu had said long- ingly in umpteen interviews. But how to do it himself He got lost in his screen career after nearly seven lackluster years playing cops, killers and Shaolin monks in Hong Kong since the early 2000s.

The turning point probably came in May 2008, when Wu volunteered to help in the relief efforts following an 8.0-magnitude earthquake in Wenchuan County in southwest China’s Sichuan Province that killed nearly 70,000 people. There he was deeply moved by the ded- ication of PLA soldiers who, though exhausted, raced against time to rescue survivors. It made him decide to make a fi lm on PLA troops, high- lighting the heroism of China’s tough men on screen.

In 2012, Wu played the leading role in a TV drama series, I Am a PLA Special Forces Operative, which was co-produced by the art arm of the PLA’s Nanjing Military Area Command, now part of the Eastern Theater Command. To play this role convincingly, he trained in a PLA special forces camp for 18 rig- orous months.

“During the training, I learned how tanks work in tandem with helicopters and the ground forces and how explosions can impact helicopters. It gave me a good grounding for directing the Wolf Warrior se- ries,” Wu told Beijing Review.

The first film in the series, Wolf Warrior, is about how Leng and his fellow PLA special forces operatives save the day when they are targeted by a vengeful drug lord and his mer- cenaries at the border. An underdog before its release, the fi lm had few takers willing to invest in it. Wu mortgaged his house and shot it on a stringent budget. It was screened in 2015 after seven years’ preparations, earning 545 million yuan ($81.79 million), nearly six times higher than insiders’ expectations.

But the box-offi ce hit of Wolf Warrior didn’t make it easy for its sequel. Wu, in order to cre- ate a credible superhero, decided to base Wolf Warrior II on the evacuation of Chinese from the Libyan war zone in 2011, which meant shoot- ing part of the fi lm in Africa.

What’s more, he preferred live action to animation for many stunning scenes. Real tank chases, on-the-spot fi lming in an African slum, one-on-one fights as well as the tight budget scared off many actors. The actress who was originally meant to play the heroine dropped out right before the filming started when she asked for more payment and was turned down. Wu’s old friend, Hong Kong actress Celina Jade, came to the rescue, stepping into her shoes.

Nine months of hard work and dozens of scars later, the shooting of Wolf Warrior II was fi nally over with 4,077 individual shots, many of which are unprecedented and breathtak- ing. Then it became a blockbuster.

“ Wolf Warrior II is much more exciting than its prequel, rousing patriotism in moviegoers,” Lin Chilei, a 37-year-old teacher in south China’s Hainan Province, told Beijing Review. Lin, a big fan of Wolf Warrior, went to watch its sequel on the second day of the release.

The Wolf Warrior series has not just cata- pulted Wu into fame, but also carved out a new career path for him. “Military-themed films are a new option, combining kungfu and action movies. It’s feasible. For me, my life has just begun,” Wu said.

A long way ahead

Wolf Warrior II is also being regarded as being on par with Hollywood in quality. “It is a creative hybrid of Chinese values and Hollywood block- busters,” said Yin Hong, a Tsinghua University professor, at a seminar in Beijing in August. Yin said Wolf Warrior II combines a Rambo-style fighter with Chinese symbols such as the na- tional flag and passport, creating the Chinese version of the military superhero popularized by Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series of fi lms in which he also played the eponymous hero.

Different from the other hits in the Top 100 list whose box-office revenue came from diverse regions, 99 percent of Wolf Warrior II’s ticket sales come from the Chinese mainland. It has made some observers say that Chinese fi lms still have a long way to go to win interna- tional audiences.

How to present wars in a more humanistic way is a problem for military-themed action films, Chen said. Yin echoed that, saying Wolf Warrior II is short on instilling a sense of hu- manitarian care, and has excessive bloodshed. “Without respect for every kind of life, Chinese fi lms can never go global,” he warned.

But in Wu’s opinion, what is unique to China may wow the rest of the world as well. “We need to be faithful to our original aspiration and fi gure out a way to project our indigenous cul- ture onto the international screen,” he said. Effi cient global distribution and promotional channels are another prerequisite for China’s fi lms to go global. “Most Chinese fi lms reach the international market by selling their overseas distribution rights. None are distributed and promoted directly like the U.S. blockbusters,” said Jiang Wusheng, General Manager of United Entertainment Partners, one of the distributors of Wolf Warrior II.

Perhaps Wu will figure out how to over- come this hurdle when Wolf Warrior III hits the screens. For now, he’s taking it easy and his white hair has turned black.

“I dyed it,” he grinned.

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