The Return of the Condor Heroes Review

It should be noted before getting into the main body of this that this review will not be going into the plotline of Return of the Condor Heroes with any significant depth. With fifty episodes at roughly forty two minutes per episode spread over a dozen DVDs and a plotline spanning years and an enormous cast of characters there is simply to much to go into at depth. If you are looking for that sort of information a quick web search should turn up episode guides for this classic work.

From time to time a television series represents such a significant collision of talents that it becomes legendary, serving as a launching pad for a host of successful careers. Here in Canada people point to SCTV as one such show, launching the international careers of John Candy, Martin Short and Rick Moranis while making Canadian comedy icons of Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy. Those early Saturday Night Live casts are another example. 1983 martial arts television series The Return of the Condor Heroes is clearly another such example. The show, which during its original 1983 broadcasting boasted a staggering 90% audience share and is widely considered one of the finest martial arts series ever made, featured a youthful Andy Lau in the lead role in front of the camera and a behind the scenes crew that included Wong Tim Lam – a well respected director since the 1950's, recently featured in front of the camera in Johnny To's Election – action choreography by House of Flying Daggers choreographer Ching Siu Tung and a script by Wai Ka Fai, now one of the most powerful producers in Hong Kong film.

The massive, sprawling work based on a swordplay novel by Jin Yong takes numerous detours into a range of subplots and side feuds but at its heart it is the story of Yeung Gor, an orphan boy discovered living in a cave by reknowned martial artist Kwok Ching. Kwok recognizes Yeung as the son of a dead comrade – a death he considers himself partially responsible for – and takes the boy in, determined to raise him into a virtuous man. But Yeung is a headstrong, stubborn boy who doesn't take direction well, a problem made worse when he is bullied by Kwok's jealous daughter and shuffled to the side by Kwok's wife, and it isn't long before fights are breaking out and Yeung is shipped off to study martial arts at the famous Chung Yeung Monastery. But things don't go much better there. His shifu at the monastery intentionally humiliates him and when Yeung strikes back with kung fu learned covertly from a famous – and amnesiac – villain he takes shelter in a neighboring tomb, a tomb that is home to the Dragon Girl, a famous martial artist and sole remaining member of the Ancient Tomb sect. Yeung is taken in by the Dragon Girl and spends his adolescence training in kung fu under her tutelage.

Now, here's why I say there is simply too much to synopsize. That paragraph above? That's just the basic setup for the show and it takes four full episodes to get that far. Before even meeting Yeung we have met feuding clans of martial artists, jilted lovers, an insane grave robber and already witnessed martial arts battles numbering comfortably into the double digits. We've got battles with swords, battles with needles, battles with trees and good old hand to hand combat. Slow moving this is not. The show is loaded with plot and characters and it flies along at a rapid pace.

So, if that's the setup then what's the body? If there was ever any doubt where Condor Heroes was going it disappears immediately once Lau turns up as the grown up version of Yeung. The clan warfare, the competing schools of martial arts, the meandering subplots, they're all just window dressing to spruce up what is, at it's core, a love story between Yeung and the Dragon Girl. Dragon Girl has been raised in a martial arts sect that demands a complete lack of emotion and disdains all men. Yeung, for his part, has been repeatedly abandoned and abused by the adults in his life, leaving him both desperate for approval and deeply distrustful. And yet, nevertheless, the do inevitably fall in love, only to be tragically separated and have to fight their way back together.

The Return of the Condor Heroes, then, is essentially a soap opera albeit it a soap opera in which the principal characters are continually squaring off to spar. The plotlines are labyrinthine with constant quirks and subplots with the main story moving forward only incrementally episode by episode and characters continually being thrown into extreme emotional distress. The scripts are written purely to entertain with their constant twisting, constant traumas, and regular shocking reveals, and entertain it does.

On a technical level The Return of the Condor Heroes is very much a product of its time. The video elements are remarkably well preserved but this is a film shot on video more than twenty years ago and the video stock and lighting has that distinct childhood made for TV soap look to it. It does, however, boast some impressively large scale standing sets, strong design work, and plentiful fight choreography sure to please old school kung fu fans. Seriously, you can expect a martial arts sequence roughly every ten minutes. Not surprisingly the weak link on the technical end are the special effects which, to put it kindly, are crude.

On a story and performance level Return of the Condor Heroes is remarkably strong. The entire cast is solid, particularly once the young ‘uns have time to grow up, and the characters are defined strongly enough that it is surprisingly easy to follow the links and relationships between them. In the first couple episodes it is very clear that this is a sequel production – the Condor Heroes are returning, after all – with characters making regular reference to past events and while knowledge of those earlier events may very well broaden the emotional impact of what's going on it is in no way necessary to understand and appreciate the story being told here.

This DVD release is the first time Condor Heroes has ever been available with English subtitles and the translation, though not without grammatical quirks, is generally very clear and easy to follow. While the TV episodes are all fully translated the bonus features are not. The question many Chinese speaking fans had was whether this edition would be more complete than the earlier, Chinese only, VCD edition which was cropped significantly from the broadcast version. The answer to that is yes, it is far more complete than the VCD issue, but it does fall short from being fully restored. The release notes say that the vast majority of previously cut footage has been restored but there are still some alterations from the broadcast version thanks to damage suffered by the original broadcast elements. So, while not 100% complete this is the most complete edition that will ever exist.

For western viewers unfamiliar with old school martial arts epics The Return of the Condor Heroes may come as a bit of a surprise. The old novels these types of shows were sourced on were essentially pulp serials, published incrementally to wildly enthusiastic readerships. They were essentially the equivalent of comic books to many Chinese, an episodic fantasy escape, written not for depth but for entertainment value. Go in expecting serious art house drama and it will not meet that expectation. But for pulp entertainment author Jin Yong was considered one of the best, this is considered one of his finest works, and this particular version is universally hailed as the best adaptation of Jin put on film. The set may be a bit on the pricey side but with a total run time over two thousand minutes and the overall quality of the production it is very hard to suggest it doesn't give value for the dollar. Rightly hailed as a classic work The Return of the Condor Heroes deserves a spot right next to the Shaw Brothers collection on any martial arts fan's shelf.