We saw a preview for Eye for an Eye (2022) on the disc for The Night of the Assassin (probably). We said something like, "we could watch that". So when I saw it at the library, I scooped it up.
It stars Miao Xie as a blind bounty hunter. In a tribute to the Zatoichi series (I guess), we meet him in a gambling den, detecting cheating with his hearing alone. Then, when the gamblers ambush him, he kills them all.
Then we meet Weiman Gao, a young woman who makes wine and is about to be married. When Xie asks her for a drink, she invites him to her wedding, where the wine will be free. He stops for a while, dropping his burden, an outlaw in a burlap bag he's taking for the bounty. But her gangster brother shows up, followed by some worse, enemy gangsters, who kill him and the groom, and take the bride prisoner.
This annoys Xie, but he doesn't think it's his business at first. Against the advice of his agent, he decides to free the girl. In doing so, he finds that the gang's connections go right to the top.
He also gets to do a lot of fancy fighting. Most of it is pretty conventional, if excellent, but there are a couple of cute tricks. In one fight, he sprays his opponents with wine so that he can smell their locations. In another, he tosses a jar of liquor in the air, slices it with his sword, then strikes a spark with the blade against his scabbard, igniting a fireball, and letting his swing around a flaming sword. That scene was in the trailer, and maybe why we decided to watch.
It seems that these movies, and a bunch more, are part of the Well Go film distributors' Hi-Yah streaming service. I don't know if they are financing or just buying, but they do seem to be boosting the output of these recent martial arts movies. We'll be seeing more, I'm sure. I'm even thinking about subscribing.
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