Mission for the Dragon (1979)
aka Maegwon
Article 5934 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-30-2021
Directed by Si-Hyeon Kim
Featuring Dragon Lee, Carter Wong, Jin-Su Ahn
Country: South Korea / Hong Kong
What it is: Lots of fight choreography

Two families are caught in a feud when their respective patriarchs go missing. This causes them to engage in sound-enhanced gesturing and extreme signing.

Martial Arts movies have their own set of conventions that strain the bounds of the possible in such a way that they might qualify as fantastic cinema; I’ve seen some scenes where these people seem capable of flying. Nevertheless, I’m going to restrict my reviews to those that have fantastic content that’s a little more concrete. In this case, there’s a subplot involving a monstrous figure in a haunted cave. I am impressed with the energy and speed of a lot of these fights, though I never quite believe that any of these people are actually hitting each other. The fights are pretty spectacular in this one, but the plot is a mess and the dubbing is laughably horrendous. Still, I doubt that any of these weaknesses would bother fans of martial arts movies.