
Early Donnie Yen movies before Ip Man revisited, from Drunken Tai Chi to Cheetah on Fire
Today, Donnie Yen Ji-dan is unquestionably one of the most famous Hong Kong film actors in the world.
Advertisement
Yen's superlative martial arts skills should have turned him into a star when he made his film debut in 1984, but it somehow took him almost 25 years to reap the acclaim he deserved, coming with
the Ip Man films in the 2000s.
'In the 1990s, Yen seemed fated to play bad guys in big films and good guys in small films,' critic Grady Hendrix said in 2012. 'Producers just wouldn't take the risk on him as a leading man.'
Just this week, we were greeted with news that he is set to direct and star in a stand-alone spin-off feature based on his character Caine from the Hollywood action franchise John Wick.
Below we re-evaluate some of the films Yen made at the start of his career.
1. Drunken Tai Chi (1984)

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


South China Morning Post
2 days ago
- South China Morning Post
Ana de Armas talks about being back on screen with Keanu Reeves after 10 years
Years before Ana de Armas was using an ice skate to slice a neck in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, she co-starred with Keanu Reeves in a very different film. Advertisement The erotic thriller Knock Knock, released in 2015, was de Armas' first Hollywood film. De Armas, born and raised in Cuba, had just come to Los Angeles after acting in Spain. English was new to her, so she had to learn her lines phonetically. 'It was tough and I felt miserable at times and very lonely,' she says in an interview. 'But I wanted to prove myself. I remember being in meetings with producers and they would be like, 'OK, I'll see you in a year when you learn English'. Before I left the office, I would say, 'I'll see you in two months'.' And now, 10 years after those scenes with Reeves , de Armas is, for the first time, headlining a big summer action film. Advertisement In Ballerina, which opened in cinemas on June 6, de Armas' progressive development as an unlikely action star reaches a butt-kicking crescendo, inheriting the mantle of one of the most esteemed high-body-count franchises.


South China Morning Post
7 days ago
- South China Morning Post
15 of the best female assassin movies as Ballerina, the new John Wick spin-off, releases
This week sees the cinema release of Ballerina, the first in a series of planned spin-off movies from the incredibly successful John Wick action franchise. Focusing on a new character, Eve, portrayed by Ana de Armas No Time to Die ), the film follows the exploits of a young orphan who is recruited into the secret Ruska Roma organisation, where she is raised as a deadly assassin. Once unleashed into the world, however, Eve applies her new skill set to track down the gangsters responsible for murdering her father. Adopting a more grounded approach than the operatic staging of its predecessors, Ballerina only truly comes to life during its elaborate action set pieces, many of which were apparently overseen by John Wick series director Chad Stahelski during substantial reshoots. Play The inclusion of Keanu Reeves' eponymous anti-hero also betrays a lack of confidence that Ballerina can attract an audience solely on its own merits – something Donnie Yen Ji-dan might want to consider as he embarks on his own John Wick spin-off, based on his character from John Wick: Chapter 4 While not the best example of its genre, Ballerina nevertheless continues a long-standing tradition of female assassin films that stretches back decades.


South China Morning Post
27-04-2025
- South China Morning Post
From a RoboCop x Russ Meyer story to Shu Qi as sexy avenger, Hong Kong exploitation films
'Exploitation films', which rely on copious amounts of soft-core sex, gore and violence to attract an audience, began in the United States in the 1960s with films like Blood Feast. By the 1970s, hundreds were being made. Advertisement Hong Kong did not really explore the genre until the late 1980s – but once it started, it went for it, no holds barred. We recall three classics of the exploitation genre made in Hong Kong. 1. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) Prison films were a big part of the exploitation genre, and the gross-out Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, often regarded as Hong Kong's most outrageous action movie, takes the idea to the max. There are sadistic wardens, brutal gang bosses, buckets of blood and gore, and plenty of hard-hitting futuristic kung fu courtesy of choreographer Philip Kwok Chun-fung, whose time in the Five Deadly Venoms perfectly prepared him for the theatrical action on show here. Fan Mei-sheng (left) and William Ho Ka-kui in a still from Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. Photo: Fortune Star Media Set in the then-future of 2001, the story sees the lean and muscular Ricky (Louis Fan Siu-wong, who later played Jin in 2008's Ip Man ) incarcerated in a maximum-security prison for killing the gangsters who murdered his girlfriend.