The Wrath of Vajra had more impressive fight scenes than it did ‘roll your eye’ moments, but it had enough of the latter to temper the appeal of the film. Set in the 1930s, the story revolves around a Japanese cult in occupied China. They worship Hades, and make weapons-free combat a most valued skill. For a dozen years, the Hades cult has been quiet, but it’s being resurrected by its originator, who tasks actor Steve Yoo’s character to rebuild it. Unfortunately for the children of China that are in the area of this secretive cult compound, rebuilding the Hades cult means capturing young boys and training them to be violent killing machines who value the cult more than anything else.
Xing Yu is the protagonist. Many years ago, he too was a child that was captured and raised in Hades for years. He grew up there Yoo’s character, too. While a boy in Hades, Xing accidentally killed his brother during a fight they were forced to engage in. When he finally escaped this hell, he sought to ease his burden by becoming a Shaolin monk. At the temple he became enlightened and learned the martial way. When his young temple-brother gets kidnapped by the renewed forces of Hades, Xing sets out to free him and the dozens of other children captured, and hopefully end the cult once and for all.
While there are some side plots involving others in Hades willing to help Xing, the crux of The Wrath of Vajra is three battles. Xing must defeat the champions of Hades in order to get a chance to fight Yoo, and each of the three battles are given a unique stage and angle. First up is the ‘tank’ – played by Baocheng Jiang, who according to IMDB stands a massive 7’6″. After battling the slow but powerful Jiang, Xing faces the vampiric fighter known as Crazy Monkey, played Heon Jun Nam. Crazy Monkey’s character and place in the movie didn’t sit well with me at first, but after mulling over it randomly a couple of days after having seen the movie, the character fit more than not, although barely. The Wrath of Vajra walks a fine line on a pretty regular basis between interesting and cheesy. While it never approached the constant face-palming of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and in fact I didn’t even think of that mess while watching The Wrath of Vajra, I thought director Wing-cheong Law dabbled too much in the supernatural/cultist approach. Besides Xing’s likeable character, the fight choreography, largely attributed to Sammo Hung Kam-Bo and Peng Zhang, tip this movie in the right direction.
The Blu-ray release from Well Go USA is nicely done. There are three trailers that pop-up before the menu, and then you’re presented with a nicely designed and accessible menu with a few of your standard choices. Supported languages include the Mandarin+Japanese 5.1 track, which I preferred, as well as an English dub and English and French subtitles. There isn’t much in the way of bonus features, but what’s included is worth a look. The trailer, in HD, is here, as well as a six-part making of feature that yield about twenty-five minutes aggregate. The making of feature blends these six parts (“The Mission,” “Martial Art Styles,” “The Rebirth,” and “Fighting I, II, III”) together, or you can skip to them individually. Either way, expect overly long intro and outro animations and filler lasting the better part of a minute for each segment. That nuisance aside, the director and lead actors share their input and lots of clips from the final movie are shown, as well as a lot of production footage which is always cool to see.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
