A long and rambling gestation period though the film had, Little Big Soldier doesn’t show it: it is one of Chan’s best films in a very long time, and not just because his increasingly frequent Hollywood projects are so foul and degraded (a thought that petrified me: there was a time, several days at least, when Little Big Soldier was playing theaters in China, while The Spy Next Door was still hanging around in America). The film has a sensibility that is not entirely like most of Chan’s other projects; it is more thoughtful, introspective. It is situational comedy, rather than slap-stick (though slap-stick is certainly present, with Chan himself choreographing the action which is, like most of his recent films, a great deal less acrobatic than in his peak era, and still a hell of a lot more fluid and demanding than a 56-year-old has any business attempting).
In fact, what I was reminded of most of all was not even the grand tradition of martial arts cinema, but the work of Charles Chaplin. Now to be fair, comparing Chan and Chaplin is neither a new observation nor a particularly difficult one. But Little Big Soldier, from its title on down, is Chaplinesque more in theme than just in the cosmetic similarities in the way that both men position themselves within comic-action setpieces. The Chaplin who wrote the unashamedly mawkish ending of The Great Dictator would certainly find favor with the Chan who writes and plays the well-meaning coward who keeps holding forth his essentially pacifist ideals with every step in the mountains and forests through which he drags the irritated general (in his tendency to espouse highly self-regarding aphorisms and to prize the logic of cowardice over the stupid sacrifices demanded by honor, I must confess that I also saw just a hint of John Falstaff in the little soldier.
Of course there is still fighting; there are still loopy sight gags; there is a revenge saga with brutal violence just along the edges that never lets us forget that we’re in History Epic territory. But all of this is packed alongside a basically human comedy of manners, in which the soldier and the general start to learn a degree of regard for one another. The blend of high-energy action and character work is not unheard of, or even particularly uncommon; and yet it is achieved here with a special degree of pleasant grace, befitting the fact that the man at the center of the project was rolling it around in his head for two decades.
It is only the second film from director Ding Sheng, who carries the film off as well as it needs to be; the visual aesthetic is simple but effective, while the gentle drift from comedy to sentimentality to outright melodrama in the last scene is handled nobly; at all points, Ding keeps his touch feather-light, allowing the performances to create the atmosphere and emotion rather than using heavyhanded cameras and music and the like (I might as well point out that Little Big Soldier navigates the shift from comedy to melodrama much more effortlessly than Chaplin’s own The Great Dictator, which rather does shriek to a halt at the end). It is an easygoing movie, fun to watch and likable, with even the simplified action sequences proving themselves creative and impeccably-executed. It does not, perhaps, try to do very much, but all the things it does try, it achieves with glowing perfection.
8/10