My Review of "The Paper Tigers"

The Paper Tigers came out quietly in 2020. I remember seeing a short trailer for it a long time ago. It seemed to be a pretty cool concept but never airing in the theaters I quickly forgot about the movie. Just recently it's been added to Netflix and I remembered the fun premise of the movie and decided to watch it.

The movie starts off with a mysterious murder. It's an old man that dies in an empty alleyway. As his life slowly drifts away the camera pans over to his arm where there's an insignia scarred on his forearm. This is to signify that he was in fact some sort of kung fu master.

We then get thrown back in time to about 30 years in the past. We see the old man and he's younger. He's teaching three of his disciples the ways of kung fu. They seem to be going through some rigorous training but through a series of montages we see these three grow as martial artists. They become so good that they go from school to school beating down the best of the best.

Then we cut to the present and these young men are now grown adults. They have responsibilities and have kind of forgotten their martial art past. That is until word gets out that their sifu (teacher) has recently died. It quickly becomes apparent that the death of their sifu was no accident. He was murdered.

That's when the movie really starts up because the three men now have to find out who killed their master and stop his murderer. It sounds simple enough but they haven't trained in so long that they're all old men that are a shadow of their former selves.

The main emphasis is on the character Danny as he was the most revered protégé. He was supposed to go somewhere to build a bigger name for himself but something happens that will later be explained in the movie. I wished they had gone into more details of their explanation because Danny seems to have gone a huge 180 from what he was when he was younger.

Each of the characters have pretty interesting in their own right. The relationship between these three is pretty well done but they could have emphasized it a little more. I think a little more time on this over Danny's contemplation over his own moral dilemmas would have been preferred. This is pretty much a nitpick though.

The action sequences are done quite well. I really liked how painful they made certain scenes look. You can really feel the impact of some of the stunts that they did in this movie. That's pretty good considering how low budget the rest of the film feels. They were so well done that I couldn't wait to see the next action sequence when they'd go back into the story.

Looking back there were a few convenient things that happened that helped propel our main protagonists. I was surprised how I didn't even notice them while I was watching the movie. They made it believable enough for me to just absorb it. That's pretty good storytelling.

Overall, I would say that I had a blast watching this movie. It feels a lot more relatable than other martial art movies that have come out recently. These three protagonists seem like everyday people. The only thing is that they have extraordinary pasts. I would have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. I will definitely be referring people to watch it especially old fogeys like me.