How should Ashton Chen "re-carve" Xie Miao after the action film became a big "only child"?
Wen | Zero One
On August 3rd, Ashton Chen directed and acted the online movie "Punch after Drunk", which starred Ashton Chen, Hao Shaowen, Yin Ziwei, Zhang Shi, Ewong , King-Tan Yuen, Che Baoluo, Chen Xinwei, etc. There was a serious lack of content in the online movie market in summer. After it was launched, "Punch after Drunk" quickly ranked first in the hot list of Tencent Video and iQiyi Station.
The market trends of action movies in cinemas and networks are quite different. During the summer vacation, the box office of the two action films "Customs Front" and "Legend" were far lower than expected, and in the online movie market where the overall performance declined, the action film basically became the strong type of "the only remaining fruit":
In 2024, action movies accounted for more than 70% of the online movies with box office over 10 million, including Black and White Stealing with 37 million yuan, Suit Mob with 28 million yuan, and Impersonal 2, Violence Control and Evil Suppression, which performed well in the pay-per-view market.
It is not difficult to find that Xie Miao, Andy On and Chen Guokun have become the protagonists in this wave of network action movies, especially Xie Miao’s development and transformation is the most successful. The characters established through the series of Northeast never to lose and Overlooking Nobody have been highly recognized, and their performances have been stabilized and broadened, with much more room for development than in the past.
Like Xie Miao, Ashton Chen, who was once regarded as Jet Li’s successor, was exactly the same as Xie Miao in the confused period of his previous actor career. With the decline of the Kung Fu film market in the cinema, it is difficult to see them in mainstream commercial films, and the low-cost network has further consumed its own reputation. Until the pattern of the content market changed in recent years, in the era when the scale of the online movie market was shrinking, kung fu films with increasingly refined production level became the dominant type, which also gave these kung fu stars their own development space.
But compared with Xie Miao, who has found his own way, Ashton Chen is still waiting for his chance to come. In December, 2022, Ashton Chen directed the first online movie "Skipping School Detective", which performed well from the director’s debut. Douban scored 5.7, and the sub-account box office reached 20 million+.This film with mixed elements of Hong Kong films got good market feedback, which may be the important reason why we can see "Punch after Drunk" now.
However, with the "fast food" such as Skipping School Detective and Drunk Punch, which has not broken away from the traditional online routine in essence, Ashton Chen is obviously not enough to make a gorgeous turn, and the follow-up new films such as Catch the Knife with a swift sword may be the real turning point.
The general impression of "Punch after Drunk" is basically the same as that of "Skipping School Detective" —— a large number of traditional kung fu films with dramatic paragraphs, occasional bright action design and lens movement, and a large number of settings for stitching elements of Hong Kong films. Instead of paying attention to details, it focuses on highlighting contradictory plot arrangements. As a whole, it is a common online action film with obvious selling points but obvious shortcomings.
Ashton Chen tried his best to give his best part in the film. At the beginning of the film, he chose to use editing techniques to connect four different scenes of fighting, such as bench, club, double knives and wrestling, in the ring, rain lane, narrow aisle and other different scenes of fighting scenes to highlight the martial arts strength of the protagonist Lin Yao. This clip lasted for nearly 6 minutes.
It is not difficult to find that this is another product of a typical conclusion of "the first five minutes of the Internet University", which puts the information of "a lot of drama" in front of the audience and directly attracts the audience to continue watching. The plot of the film then began to reverse in close encounter of mahjong, and the invincible young master suffered heavy losses in his life. It was the controversial plot setting of Huo Yuanjia in that year, and other overall elements of the film were almost a combination of a number of Hong Kong kung fu films such as pull no punches, Drunken Boxing, Huo Yuanjia and Su Qier.
From the perspective of the low cost of the film, the final production level of "Punch after Drunk" has many remarkable points, such as hard work, many changes in scenes, and the performance level of most shots is up to standard. However, the problem of the film is the obvious lack of integrity-there is no reasonable and concise story line, no consistent action martial arts aesthetics, and no ambition of theme expression and aesthetic expression. Compared with the "Skipping School Detective" filmed with Zou Zhaolong, the overall impression can be said to be no progress.
However, there are still many works in Ashton Chen that have been started or filmed. The Knife Catcher is directed by Pengfei Qin, the team behind the series "Northeast never to lose" and "Arrogant", which can be regarded as an important link for the series "Arrogant" to expand the world view of the role of "Knife Catcher".
From the perspective of Weibo, Ashton Chen, "Fighting Black", which was also directed by Pengfei Qin and co-starred with Bao Beier, who played an outstanding role in "Fighting Violence", was launched in March this year. The poster shows that the film is a new project of "Cloud Cinema" of iQiyi, and its performance in the paid market is worth observing; In June of this year, "Skipping School Detective II" started after two years.
It can be seen that after testing the online movie market, Ashton Chen has gone from the trial period of "Skipping School Detective" to the stable output period. The three films to be shown, Catch the Knife Man, Fight the Black, Play Truant Detective 2, will be important projects for Ashton Chen to recreate Xie Miao’s career, and the quality and level of the films are very important.
Rather than saying that action movies are like a duck to water in the online movie market, it is better to say that action movies have gradually become a traditional type of film with a stable audience but difficult to break. Mainstream commercial movies are often a mixture of multiple types, and it is no longer the era when action stars should take up the box office. Jackie Chan, a kung fu superstar of the older generation, is still producing a lot. In recent years, one movie in the domestic market is not as good as one. However, most of the new generation Wu Xing didn’t find their own roles, until they struggled in the online movie market, and finally found that the public’s demand for action movies was still very stable, but they just needed some more aesthetic innovation.
At present, what has been done well in this field is obviously represented by the team behind the series "Northeast never to lose" and "Arrogant". In these two series, Yang Bingjia is mainly responsible for the scriptwriting and drama, Pengfei Qin is mainly responsible for the action design, both of which are starring Xie Miao and Wei Junzi is the producer. Both series have scored more than 7 points in Douban, and the box office of "Arrogant" and "Arrogant 2" is more than 20 million, and "Northeast Police Story 2" is 30 million, which can be called both word-of-mouth and commercial value.
The innovations made in these two series can basically be summarized as "a small step forward" on the level of traditional big action movies. The upgrade direction they found on the basis of not expanding the cost too much can be summarized as follows: improving the aesthetics of action drama, filling the emotional impact of the plot and creating the protagonist with memory points.
Action drama is the foundation of action movies. However, as a mature commercial film type, martial arts action has already experienced profound development in the golden age of Hong Kong films, and the audience of online action movies is often the "old guns" who have seen many action movies. How to arouse the emotions of these audiences?
From this point of view, "Arrogant" is an excellent model, and the creative team’s experimental ideas in this project are obvious-only 70 minutes+,a large number of blank plots and character background settings, highly stylized personnel design and action design, all the miscellaneous and extensive water injection techniques are abandoned, leaving behind highly distinctive characters, story conflicts that are highly matched with characters, and stories that are highly matched with such characters and plots.
At last, the film left the audience with the deepest impression, which was nothing more than the villain’s "good blind man", the high-level action expressions such as blind stick with one sword to seal the throat, flame with two knives, snow and sky battle, and the lens composition and color with remarkable personality and style.
In the final analysis, the difficulty of the action drama of "Arrogant" is not as exaggerated as that of its peers, but the visual effect is higher. To a great extent, this is the result of the coordination of lens scheduling, unique personnel design and plot atmosphere. The film successfully made the audience realize the essence of the martial arts behind the role of becoming blind, and the emotion was mobilized. The film went beyond the lens and action aesthetics of its peers, further strengthening the expression effect of "from emotion to action and then returning to emotion".
This is actually a lack of current online action movies. For example, the four fighting scenes at the beginning of "One Punch after Drunk" are not hard to play, but they can’t arouse the audience’s emotions at all-this is of course because there is no plot conflict and emotional contrast, just "fighting for the sake of fighting".
Therefore, it is very important to have a suitable and memorable protagonist. Xie Miao’s difficulty from a child star to his early comeback is largely due to the fact that his appearance and personality didn’t match the right role, while Li Hongqi and Cheng Blind are extremely distinctive and personalized, and they are a perfect match with Xie Miao’s temperament, which is also impossible to meet.
Back to the topic of Ashton Chen, as a child star, Ashton Chen’s confusion when he grew up is also largely a lack of representative roles. How high he can reach in the three subsequent works, Catch the Knife Man, Fight the Black, and Skip School Detective 2, largely depends on the fit between the role and the actor’s own temperament.
* Original article, please indicate the source when reprinting.
?