The legacy of Bruce Lee lives on with Into the Badlands, AMC's new martial arts epic, about a warrior and a young boy who journey through a dangerous feudal empire seeking enlightenment.
Were Lee alive today, odds are he would love Into the Badlands.
This mashup of martial arts, sci-fi, Japanese samurai and steampunk – set centuries into a dystopian future where fists of fury and swordplay drive a feudal society ruled by rival Barons – builds on Lee's legacy with an integrity and ferocity usually reserved for the big screen. When this six-episode, post-apocalyptic fantasy debuts on Monday on AMC, expect "all the things we love, you know, the good stuff", says co-creator Alfred Gough, who previously brought Smallville to the telly with his partner Miles Millar.
“These fights are like big dance numbers.... They have to be showstoppers.”
“If you don’t do it right, it becomes pornography,” says series star Daniel Wu, who wields impeccable credentials as a Hong Kong-based action hero as well as a scholar in the martial arts discipline of wushu (China’s national sport, largely a performance version of various martial arts styles).
Even more critically, “we wanted the storyline to be as good if not better than the action scenes”.
Wu stars as Sunny, the most lethal of the trained assassins known as Clippers, who serve in the loyal armies deployed by seven rival Barons to enforce their iron rule in the Badlands, a dusty torchlit world where guns are banned.
Only a few scraps of technology have survived, including Sunny’s massive metal steampunk motorcycle with its nautical compass, the epitome of cool as it screams past dazzling fields of poppies being harvested for opium.
Sunny is the Regent (Head Clipper) and most trusted advisor of Baron Quinn (Marton Csokas, The Equalizer), an evil sort who speaks with a southern drawl and looks like an Amish warlord with his square beard and starchy shirt, as he struts about his whitewashed plantation exhorting his underlings to kill, kill, kill.
"Quinn believes the world to be a cruel place – and you have to behave accordingly," says Csokas, who recently completed shooting the upcoming feature film Voice from the Stone, in which he stars with Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones).
For decades, Quinn has been unchallenged as the Badlands' most powerful Baron. His gig is in jeopardy now, however, as the territory's newest Baron, The Widow (Emily Beecham, The Village) – a brilliant martial artist who fights like a demon and is viper-lethal in her own right – launches a brazen campaign against him with her own crew of young female warriors, the Butterflies.
Amid the carnage, Sunny rescues M.K. (Aramis Knight, the brilliant young star of Ender's Game), a teenage boy who has survived a deadly ambush and who wields strange powers.
Sunny soon learns the boy harbours a sinister secret and has a huge bounty on his head.
Together, mentor and protégé begin an odyssey that could mean the difference between chaos and enlightenment for everyone in the Badlands.
Pulling off a great martial arts project is tricky, says Wu, a film buff and award-winning director who earned a degree in architecture at the University of Oregon before pursuing a career in Hong Kong as a model and actor at his sister’s insistence two decades ago. “As a Chinese-American kid growing up [in California], there were not many role models I could look up to on the big screen,” says Wu. “The ones that appeared were Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Those were the guys that inspired me to want to learn martial arts.”
Also an executive producer, Wu says AMC's other big series, The Walking Dead, reminded him of the need to emphasise human drama over fight scenes.
“We wanted to create this martial arts drama for national TV,” says the 41-year-old, who has appeared in 60 films.
“This is something that has never been done before. But in order to be successful you can’t just have great martial arts and no story. People would just fast-forward through to the fight scenes and then turn off the show.”
• Into the Badlands is broadcast at 6.10am (same as in the US) and repeated at 10pm on Monday on AMC. For a rundown of other martial arts-inspired TV series, go to www.thenational.ae/arts-life
artslife@thenational.ae
