Despite having numerous Shaw Brothers alumni and Chang Cheh as the director, The Shanghai Thirteen (1984) was not a Shaw Brothers production. Instead, it was produced by someone named Chan Hsi-Fan, whom I don’t recognize, and was written by Chang Cheh himself. I read elsewhere that around this period, Chang Cheh was 60 and nearing retirement age so this film was made to help fund that. I don’t know how well it did at the box office but it was done on a low budget. And without the Shaw Brothers machine behind Chang Cheh and even with the star power, there are numerous flaws from this movie which make it far from a classic, despite what some critics may say.
There really isn’t much of a plot to this movie outside of a junior minister who is a patriot and trying to help his country against the Japanese and another section of the government as the key motivator. The rest of the plot is the junior minister, Mr. Gao, going from area to area meeting up with the 13 Rascals, who either defend him or want to take him out. Another minister makes a cameo early on to help describe some of the issues but from there, it’s almost non-stop fighting.
Kind of like The Five Venoms, the 13 Rascals all have hidden identities but are described as coming from all walks of life from beggars to wealthy people. But it isn’t clear really which people are the actual Rascals during the movie outside of when they are explicitly mentioned. Some characters are purely random such as Wong Ching who just shows up and starts laughing. Each one are given a limited amount of screen time but just enough to show some superfluous personality trait related to their identity as one of the 13.
Yet the real purpose of the movie, besides the aforementioned retirement plan, was pretty much token favors that many of the stars here gave back to Chang Cheh for helping to jumpstart their careers. It really was a near all star cast of the who’s who from various generations of Chang Cheh’s Shaw Brothers days with top names like David Chiang, Ti Lung, Jimmy Wang Yu, Chen Kuan-Thai, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, etc. There were a few newer names that I never had seen such as Sonny Yue and Andy Lau (whom I think got really famous later on)
Part of their involvement seemed as though Chang Cheh wanted to give certain actors the ability to have fights or roles that they were never given during their Shaw Brothers stints. For instance, Beardy (Leung Kar-Yan) fights Lu Feng, Ti Lung battles Ricky Chien Tien-Chi while Chi Kuan-Chun plays a bad guy. While these encounters seemed novel, nothing really stood out for me in terms of groundbreaking fights or moments. In fact, this felt more like a bland throwback to Chang Cheh’s style where most of the key characters are slowly eliminated until only Ti Lung is left standing (well, Jimmy Wang Yu and Chen Kuan-Thai both survived but neither really had big combative moments and were mostly used as cameos).
I think a huge reason why the movie felt so bland is that the fighting ended up becoming nonsensical in terms of the sheer volume of fights. There are supposed to be a few emotional moments that fell flat like Andy Lau as the student who is faced with the difficult decision of saving his (supposed?) girlfriend from Lu Feng. They get a sad song with a bizarre flashback that alludes to their relationship but the plot and dialog are so bad it’s impossible to know that they were in a relationship or not. For instance, Lu Feng, while holding holding the girl hostage, abruptly asks Andy, “Don’t you love her?” Up until this point, we don’t even know whom Andy Lau’s character is. Why would he love this random girl whose character isn’t established outside of having a rich brother who just got murdered? After all, Andy Lau randomly just shows up to defend Mr. Gao.
By the end, the plot (or what’s left of it) practically is tossed out the window as the movie slowly degenerates into a near continuous series of fight scenes. Just as Mr. Gao seems to lose hope while Andy Lau’s character gets sliced up, Ti Lung makes his deux ex machina save. A bunch of random people dressed mostly in white t-shirts come out of the literal wood work to back up Ti Lung and Mr. Gao while the original bad guy group from earlier who had been chasing Mr. Gao all night have effectively an all out gang fight at the loading dock.
Then there’s a really bizarre moment where some fat Chan Sing arrives in a karate gi and I have no fucking clue who he is except when Ti Lung briefly engages with the guy and declares, “You’re the Black Eagle. I’m going to kill you.” Like seriously, WTF. Who the fuck is the Black Eagle? Why would Ti Lung want to kill this guy? Why should we hate this random dude who shows up and starts busting down a cheaply made prop house? It’s just so dumb and everything is flat out stripped away just to get in another rando fight.
But it gets better because I think even the film maker got confused at one point. Ricky Cheng shows up again (he’s called the Butcher) and obviously is a bad guy because he already has killed off David Chiang and demonstrates this by tossing David’s white scarf with some blood smeared in the air. There’s some weird dialog between him and Ti Lung to verify that Ricky killed off David, which infuriates Ti Lung (and is kind of ironic due to the rumored feud between Ti Lung and David Chiang in later years which prevented them from sharing an on screen reunion in this movie). However, Ti Lung still is occupied with his encounter with Black Eagle and the other mini boss in the black outfit (I have no idea what this guy’s name is in the movie but his name is Cheung Tai-Lun).
That allows Ricky to massacre the good guy gang a bit. There’s a weird pause where after cutting a few shirts up and guys who decide to press their luck, Ricky glances at Sonny Yue, who with his Chinese fro, makes a bizarre face. Then Ricky turns his attention elsewhere as the bad guy gang try to clean up. Here’s where things get really messy. As the bad guy gang goes to fight the good guy gang, Ricky starts hurling knives at the bad guys. Then it seems as though Sonny Yue decides to attack the good guys? Or maybe it was the bad guys. Either way, I really couldn’t tell because Ti Lung is surprised and accuses Sonny Yue of betrayal apparently because they fed and took care of the guy. But Sonny Yue reveals that’s the Young Leopard, son of the older Leopard (played by the bad guy Chen Kuan-Chun). Yet he attacks the bad guys…ugh, I can’t get any of this straight.
But what really hurts is that the bad guy underboss eventually gets pinned to the ground by Ricky and is murdered by him. The dialog here makes no sense and I can’t tell if there’s a horrible translation but it sounds like Ricky took over some contract and saw the value. But the names are so misleading and there’s no clearly identifiable people in this movie because there’s too many that get mauled and aren’t established that who really knows at this point. Either way, he starts fighting with the Sonny Yue (and I go back to the actors’ real names because it’s impossible to really keep the characters straight). I have no idea why Sonny Yue is fighting with Ricky though outside of let’s have another fucking fight. All motives and logic are just gone by this point and I give up trying to figure out the plot.
Anyway, Ti Lung drop kicks Chan Sing into oblivion just as Sonny Yue jobs with his bad hair to Ricky. So that leaves Ricky and Ti Lung. Your main event of the evening boys and girls! The fight is stupid because Ricky does his usual indy garbage mudshow wrestling flippy do shit which looks like crap and Ti Lung uses a long pipe. Ti Lung wins in the end and Ricky tells the rest where he says he wanted the challenge of fighting Ti Lung. Again, I interpret this just as yesteryear’s stars fighting the more recent one. Ricky jobs because Ti Lung is more realistic as a fighter and Ricky never really became a super star compared to people like Fu Sheng. The original China vs Japan thing at this point had become irrelevant outside of just showing what a racist, nationalistic prick Chang Cheh could be and the whole thing feels like it was all a setup for Ricky to face Ti Lung.
I personally just think the writer (Chang Cheh) just said fuck it and wrote just enough to provide a small amount of motivation for the next fight to occur as the plot moved along. But the last parts just twisted on themselves where it was more about fighting gratuitous fight scenes just to have them.
Here’s the thing. This movie is far from a classic. It’s quite clear that without the machine of the Shaw Brothers, Chang Cheh on his own devices couldn’t pull out a great movie, even though he had top names in an all star cast. The plot by itself was nonsensical and superfluous. The production looked awful, grainy and cheap compared to even the mid 70s stuff. The music was mostly god awful outside of the initial 70s semi-porn theme intro. Forget the dialog and the kung fu too was nothing home to write about.
Worse yet even if Chang Cheh was doing his thing, this was 1984 and the movie felt worse than the mid 70s or even early 70s periods. The camera shots weren’t great. There were a few decent things shown like the sword coming close towards the camera but you didn’t feel like Chang Cheh had evolved stylistically.
So I guess one would ask why watch this thing?
If anything The Shanghai Thirteen is more of a novelty thing where it was pretty much Chang Cheh’s last hurrah. I know he did other movies after this but it wasn’t with all of the classic Shaw Brothers people. The movie does move reasonably fast and because it’s almost pure fighting, you don’t exactly grow bored. But you do feel de-sensitized near the end just from the sheer volume of fights. I do think it’s missing other key people involved in classic Shaw Brothers movies like Fu Sheng, the other three Venoms, Wang Lung Wei, etc. Obviously, with Fu Sheng, I think he already was gone by the time this movie was made. And I have no idea why other people didn’t appear.
Also, I commented earlier about Ricky Cheng not becoming a real top tier star. I know he was in other movies like Five Element Ninja which Chang Cheh did direct. But around this time, I felt that Chang Cheh had lost his magic and that the kung fu had gotten too ridiculous. The better kung fu movies within the Shaw Brothers were being made by Lau Kar-Leung. It felt that Ricky and others around his time period from that Taiwan opera school had arrived a little too late to be part of the main boom that happened from Jimmy Wang Yu until the Venoms’ run. Also, while talented, Ricky was more about the acrobatics than actual kung fu and so those movies like Five Element Ninja seemed ridiculous and just too over the top.
Another missing element that I think really hurt this movie was Chang Cheh’s writing partner of Ni Kuang. The movie just seems too unfocused with practically no character development and only having a single purpose of getting cameo fights in. I found that the bad dialog was far more memorable than anything resembling an actual plot here. There’s no real pathos nor connection that I could make with the characters. Sometimes, I believe that they would have been better off just stripping the dialog out altogether and getting more people to have random fights.
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