The Fist of the Condor (2023)

Original title: El Puño del Cóndor

A mysterious, shaven-headed, nearly mythical fighter (Marko Zaror) is setting out from his monk-like retreat to take some kind of vengeance. It takes quite some time, and a series of flashbacks, half-flashbacks and voice overs to reveal that he is searching for his twin brother (obviously also Marko Zaror), who took everything that meant anything to him some years ago.

Among the things taken was the manual to the powerful fighting technique the Inca used against the conquistadors, the Fist of the Condor. While our warrior hero sets out on his quest, his evil brother begins taking his own steps back into the world, or rather, he sends his brutal and really rather unpleasant disciple Kalari (Eyal Meyer) out on some nasty business that’s meant to make our protagonist suffer some more before Kalari is supposed to kill him.

It’s been quite a few years since last I saw one of the usually pretty fantastic low budget martial arts movies from Chile starring Marko Zaror – who does quite a bit of work in Hollywood on the stunt and choreography side these days, but still seems to make an independent martial arts or action movie in Chile every few years.

As always directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, this particular outing is probably not the best introduction to Zaror’s body of work for the completely uninitiated. Not because it is a bad or mediocre martial arts film – the fight sequences are all somewhere between great and absolutely inspired, mixing the beefy-brutal with the elegant in a highly convincing manner. Rather, it is the film’s narrative that might give quite a few viewers pause, or rather, a narrative structure that takes a rather straightforward vengeance tale and pulls it into temporal loops and twists that can remind one more of the temporal approaches sometimes found in arthouse cinema than of the way martial arts and action movies like to present themselves. To my eyes, it does so successfully, indeed deepening its narrative instead of obfuscating it. I can imagine myself coming out of this confused and a bit irritated watching it in the wrong mood, however.

Of course, simply going with the flow and enjoying its structural peculiarities as simple trippyness would be another fruitful, at the very least highly enjoyable, way of approaching the film as well.

The other possible stumbling block is how seriously and straight-faced Fist of the Condor takes itself as a philosophical tale of martial arts as a way to nurture body and spirit. There is no sense of irony to it at all, nor any attempt to put even the tiniest bit of distance between long monologues about martial arts philosophy and its audience. While I’m clearly not of the same mindset as the filmmakers, I do appreciate this seriousness of purpose, and even more so the risk one takes when putting oneself out there like they do.

But then, putting themselves out there, making the film these filmmakers want – perhaps need – to make, seems to be rather the point of Fist of the Condor, apart from showing off Zaror’s sculpted body and a series of great fight scenes in often spectacular landscapes (the old adage of nature being the best special effect holds), of course. This is a film that’s rather a lot more ambitious than most low budget action movies, and therefore takes the elements of the genre it is interested in and shapes them into forms it finds more interesting and pleasing, even if they will be confusing to some.