Wolf Warriors Comes Off Like The Chinese Equivalent To A Peter Berg Movie

Currently, the big Chinese box office juggernaut is Wolf Warriors 2, an action motion picture that just overtook Stephen Chow's The Mermaid to become the biggest movie of all-time in the country. It's nowhere near done with its massive box office run either and it looks like it'll likely crack $750 million at the Chinese box office, a massively impressive sum. You might be wondering if the box office performance of the first Wolf Warriors was big enough to serve as, with the power of retrospect, some kind of harbinger of the its successor huge success, but in fact, the first Wolf Warriors made a solid but not humongous $80.9 million that made it the 27th biggest movie of China.


The plot of this first Wolf Warriors movie opens with Leng Feng (Wu Jing) being a sniper for a super important mission to take down a drug lord. When the mission goes sideways, he uses his expert marksmanship to take down his squads target in a most clever way. Of course, such a move directly disobeys orders from his superiors so he gets reprimanded...but he also gets a promotion. Turns out that this bold piece of combat action has gotten him recruited to the Wolf Warriors, a group of elite soldiers that work for the Chinese government. Leng may be reckless and one to use rules as more of a guideline, but he's also a guy who recognizes a good opportunity when it comes knocking so he joins the squad.

It's a good thing he did just that cause he's gonna need some major back-up for the guy whose out to get some revenge against Leng Feng. The drug lord he took out had a brother, Ming Deng (Ni Dahong), one whose got both a thirst for vengeance and a hitman at his disposal named Tom Cat (Scott Adkins) who has been assigned with a group of soldiers to take down Leng at all costs. Tom Cut and his men attack Leng Feng during a Wolf Warriors training exercise, send Leng and his comrades immediately into combat mode as they prepare to fight with their might against this vengeful group of mercenaries.

The premise itself really hits the ground going from the get-go, with a lot of plot details that other blockbusters would dwell on for elongated periods of time being just breezed right by. For instance, Leng is initiated into the Wolf Warriors squad in mere seconds and immediately makes buddies with some of his fellow soldiers, each fall nicely into a certain easily understandable archetype. That means we get very little time to actually know Leng or the bonds he forms with his fellow Wolf Warriors, leaving action sequences in the second and third act feeling more devoid of humanity than they should, but at least the movie itself has a go-go energy to it that keeps any potential boredom at bay.

Wu Jing both headlines this movie and directs it, two areas where he proves to be decent though not extraordinary. His performance as Leng Feng is basically him going through the motions as the typical rule-breaker bad-ass you see a lot in action fare (it's the kind of character Team America: World Police lampooned over a decade ago) but he does have some moments of charm that make his character sporadically likable. In terms of direction, Jing's most notable visual attribute here is a recurring use of what appears to be GoPro cameras put on top of actors head that is intended to place the viewer directly into the action like some kind of evolved form of shaky-cam. It's used sparingly enough, so it just comes off as admirably trying something new in terms of camerawork instead of an aggravating visual quirk.

Those types of shots all show up in the action scenes, which honestly came as mostly generic to me, not helped by how many of them are brought to life by comically rapid-fire editing that recalls Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer efforts from the late 1990's. Also echoing Michael Bay is the heavy dose of patriotism in Wolf Warriors, though being a Chinese film, this one is all about praising the awesomeness of China whereas Bay's jingoistic tendencies reference America. Plenty of monologues and off-hand lines of dialogue are devoted to the glories of China, with even the bad guy (played by Scott Adkins, whose character takes far too long to take advantage of Adkins kicking-abilities) sealing his doom by mocking Leng Feng's pro-Chinese sleeve patch. These moments come off as an Eastern counterpart to domestic filmmakers like Peter Berg and their super pro-America films like Lone Survivor. Come to think of it, Wolf Warriors does feel like, as a whole movie, like a military drama in the vein of Berg's Lone Survivor or Michael Bay's 13 Hours, for better and for worse. At least the serviceable but not exceptional Wolf Warriors, while suffering from the thin characters and bland action those two American films had, separates itself from those bloated messes by keeping its run time short and sweet.