Dreadnaught

DREADNAUGHT   ***1/2

Yuen Woo-ping

1981

IDEA:  A timid laundry man must rise to the occasion to take on a vicious, mute fugitive who will stop at nothing to kill him. 

BLURB:  As an unfettered showcase for ingenious, virtuosic martial arts choreography, Dreadnaught is pretty much impossible to fault. Without anything resembling a lull in its 95-minute runtime, the film serves up a breathless parade of action sequences that execute seemingly impossible acrobatic maneuvers with unpretentious, kinetic grace. A few standouts: a dance-fight between two pairs of men in Chinese lion costumes; a doctor’s visit in which the patient’s malady is treated with a dizzying flurry of slaps to the abdomen by hands aflame; and a battle on a dark stage with the literally two-faced villain, whose masked heads flip around like Janus on speed. Nearly every action in Dreadnaught is carried out in the fashion of kung fu, including a laundry-drying routine and a tailor’s fitting - literal fashion statements! It’s not only Yuen Woo-ping’s signature elaborate choreography that wows, but the way he edits the action in staccato rhythms to create a sense of crackling and ceaseless energy; the energy of bodies in motion, and of film as their conduit.