My Review of "Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks"

I wasn't sure what to make of Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks when it became available on Netflix. I thought it was an actual movie but it was actually a documentary. Why not? I like Kung Fu movies as much as the next person, let's see how it goes.

This documentary goes into a lot of the history into the origins of Kung Fu movies. In particular, they dived deep into Hong Kong Kung Fu movies. It's interesting to me because I'm only familiar with a certain generation of Hong Kong Kung Fu movies. They went even further into the history and explain why they were important to popular culture. It even goes as far as to explain the progression of the movies.

There's interesting similarities to western and eastern cultures that had allowed Kung Fu movies to become popular in west. Although, they do go into the racism that had stunted the genre from entering into the west. It's nice to see that there were different cultural backgrounds that helped each other to help this genre into the west.

Some people might not know some of the guest speakers that make remarks about the importance of Kung Fu movies. I have a little gripe about how they introduce their guests. Well my gripe is that they don't really introduce their guests that well. They have a quick flash of their name and who they are but they don't really give the audience the full magnitude of why they are special guests for the documentary. I was lucky to recognize some of the guests but those that aren't into Hip-Hop culture will really know what the importance of the guests were.

In addition to this, they focus on the history so much that they don't take time to really explore the influence they had on popular culture. They do take a little break to explain the importance but they have short little montages with quick clips that make it a little difficult to appreciate.

I understand though. There is a hell of a lot of content in this documentary and they had to fit it all into a 2 hour cohesive product. I would say that they should have split this documentary apart into pieces so that they could give the audience some time to breathe and appreciate the guests and the influences of the art. It was a massive amount of information to take in and if someone has no previous knowledge of the subject then they might get a little overwhelmed by the documentary. I was again fortunate to know the background of a lot of the information that they were telling us so it wasn't so bad for me.

It's expected that they made this documentary for people that don't know too much about the genre so to me I would have thought they crammed way too much into the documentary. We're talking about 70 years of history crammed into 2 hours. They even omitted certain aspects of the 90's era of Kung Fu movies. The rise of popularity of Jackie Chan movies or the significance of Rumble in the Bronx when it came over to the west.

Overall, I still had a good time watching this documentary despite the rapid succession of information being thrown in my face. I was able to keep up only because I've followed a lot of the information that they were already regurgitating to me. New viewers without any knowledge of this genre of movies might not have an easy time to keep up with what is going on. In my personal opinion I would hesitatingly give this documentary a 6.5 out of 10. I'm reluctant to give it such a score because they do have some pretty interesting points and a lot of good information but the delivery is kind of botched. It really should have been made into a multi-part series. 70 years of film and their significance to popular culture cannot simply be filtered into a 2 hour documentary.