My Father is a Hero (Jet Li's The Enforcer)

My Father is a Hero (Jet Li's The Enforcer)

Jet Li re-teams with Xie Miao

By 1995, the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema was coming to an end. While Jackie Chan was already making plans to crossover to Hollywood, Jet Li tried to modernize his image by largely discarding the historical epics that made him famous in exchange for modern thriller/action hero roles. 

 

My Father is a Hero was released in the United States by the Weinstein Company's "Dragon Dynasty" imprint as "The Enforcer". Leave it to an art house oriented studio like The Weinstein Company to change the accurate, descriptive title to avoid confusion with some artsy-fartsy French film no one ever saw, yet saddle it with a generic monicker that's actually already in use by an American action film in the Dirty Harry series, which is far more likely to cause confusion.

The film reunites Li with child kung-fu champion Xie Miao (the two previously starred together in the New Legend of Shaolin) as father and son martial artists. Li's character, Wei, is is a Mainland Chinese police officer who's undercover work takes him to Hong Kong, away from his sick wife and son. Meanwhile the beautiful Hong Kong police Inspector Wong becomes suspicious of him and tracks his family down in Beijing. Things escalate from there as Wong learns and reports back to Hong Kong, Wei's cover gets more difficult to conceal, though his superiors refuse to bring him home.

As with previous Jet Li pictures, the actor plays it straight with both acting and kung-fu until the big final battle where things inevitably go over the top (à la the clownish antics of Jackie Chan), which somehow seems even more out of place in modern setting films like this one and The Bodyguard from Beijing than historical pieces like The New Legend of Shaolin.Still, for most Western audiences, this film is probably the most accessible starting place to become acquainted with Jet Li's on-camera work.