Dragon Dynasty’s ‘Enforcer’ DVD announced

The Weinstein Company’s Dragon Dynasty label is following up its release of SUPERCOP with an underappreciated Jet Li classic, THE ENFORCER, better known to longtime genre fans by its original (and more appropriate) Hong Kong English title, MY FATHER IS A HERO.

In THE ENFORCER, a Chinese police officer (Li) goes undercover in an attempt to bring down a dangerous and highly regarded Hong Kong crime ring. When his cover is blown and his family is put in harm’s way, the stakes become much higher.

THE ENFORCER features the excellent action direction of Corey Yuen and supporting performances from the late, great Anita Mui (DRUNKEN MASTER 2), Yu Rongguang (MUSA) and Tse Miu, as Li’s fighting son.

This film is not regarded as one of Li’s finest. He never seems to perform his best in a contemporary setting. But still, it’s one of my personal favorites largely because it portrays a fun father-son relationship between Li and Tse, both playing kung fu fighters, which is not something we get to see very often in martial arts cinema. Unfortunately, this is a fundamental element that is completely buried in the U.S. marketing for this movie.

I’m going to get the good stuff out of the way before getting to the potentially bad. DD continues its tradition of offering excellent bonus content, even for an average Jet Li movie. Included on this release is an exclusive interview with Hong Kong movie master of disaster Wong Jing who produced this film. I’d rather hear his thoughts on HIGH RISK, another Jet Li movie that was partly intended as a parody of Jackie Chan, but this will do. Love him or hate him, Wong Jing has long been a major force in the Hong Kong movie world and has managed to remain a commercially successful filmmaker for most of his ongoing career, which is quite remarkable given Hong Kong’s volatile film industry.

Even better is an exclusive interview with Tse Miu who hasn’t done much to speak of since but will forever be well regarded by Jet Li fans for co-starring in this film as well as THE NEW LEGEND OF SHAOLIN where Wong Jing cast him as a Chinese version of Daigoro, the child from the LONE WOLF AND CUB films. Coincidently, Tse is still appearing in martial arts roles, mostly on TV. He can be seen in the 2004 kung fu series IRON LION, released Stateside on DVD by Tai Seng. Tse more recently appeared onscreen again with Ru Rongguang in the period actioner CHAMPIONS (2008).

Also included, as usual, is another audio commentary by martial arts movie maven Bey Logan.

The following isn’t going to be received well by Asian cinema purists and I can only hope that it was some kind of error. The press release states that the disc will only be shipping with an English 5.1 soundtrack. No original Cantonese track is mentioned. If true, this would be the first time that Dragon Dynasty has presented a foreign language film without including an option to listen to the original language. If this true, I will be extremely bummed because I simply will not be able to recommend it over Mei Ah’s remastered DVD, released in 2005.

Genius Products has gotten their facts on press releases wrong before so until I get my hands on the disc I’ll hope they’re wrong again.

On a more positive note I should add that Dragon Dynasty is still giving away a year’s worth of DVDs. I’m not sure how many that equals but free is free. For a chance to win, visit Dragondynastysweeps.com.

Update: I can now confirm that Dragon Dynasty’s release of THE ENFORCER does not include a Cantonese track. Also, as a commenter below pointed out, I was incorrect in assuming that the cut matches the original Hong Kong version. This DD version is the same as the 2000 Dimension Films release, which includes several small cuts. See my DVD review for more details.