Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Paper Tigers’ on VOD, a Martial Arts Action-Comedy With Goodwill to Spare

Now on VOD, The Paper Tigers is the feature debut from Seattle-based director Tran Quoc Bao, who worked diligently for a decade to get his labor of love made. He reportedly pitched the throwback martial arts comedy to big studios, who wanted to replace his Asian-American lead actors with names like Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis. But he stuck to his guns, eventually drumming up enough money via non-Hollywood investors and Kickstarter to get the project off the ground. And now the movie has an opportunity to find an audience in a post-Crazy Rich Asians and Cobra Kai world — a happy ending for Tran, no doubt.

THE PAPER TIGERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A dark alleyway. An old man — a master. An assassin — also a master. LUB-DUB, LUB-DUB goes the soundtrack. One chop and the LUB-DUB stops. The old man is dead. Cut to 30 YEARS EARLIER. Old VHS footage set to OG hip-hop: The old man looks the same age, but whatever, he’s Sifu Cheung (Roger Yuan), and his three young disciples balance on one foot on paint buckets in eagle-crane-monkey-duckbilled-platypus poses and the like. He’s teaching them Gung Fu in his garage. He may be a master but he’s also a chef, and that’s what he does and the boys are his only students. It’s 1986, it’s 1991, it’s 1993, and the boys fart around and fight in tournaments and generally act like teenagers who also know Gung Fu. They have a logo branded on their wrist just like Sifu, marking them as members of this clan forever.

Now it’s the PRESENT DAY, and those boys are now old and, like, different. There’s Danny (Alain Uy), once known as Danny Eight Hands, now just Danny Divorced With a Kid and a Minivan. He works in insurance, womp womp, and ranks about 335,654th on the father-of-the-year list, because he’s late to pick up his son and reneges on a promise to take him to Magicland when he gets a call from work. Danny’s been long-estranged from Hing (Ron Yuan of Mulan) for Reasons To Be Explained Later in the Movie. But Hing finds him and shares the bad news: their beloved Sifu is dead. The coroner said it was a heart attack. They track down their third, Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins), and commiserate their loss over beers and palpable tension, because the way they departed was less than cool.

To say they’re washed-up Gung Fu artists is an understatement but also slightly confusing, because Danny is out of practice and Hing has a dad bod and hobbles on a busted knee and Jim is RIPPED, but he sucks at Gung Fu since he’s been teaching ground-and-pound at the local MMA gym. Their old rival, Carter (Matthew Page) — a delusional moron of a white guy who pretends to be Chinese; you get the feeling he was a real leg-sweeper back in the day — is convinced Sifu Cheung’s death is suspicious, for no reason other than he watched the first scene of the movie. And so Danny, Hing and Jim are also convinced, possibly because they also saw the first scene of the movie, not because Carter is convincing, because he’s not convincing in the least. Their investigation will inevitably involve Gung Fu Fighting, pulled groins, significant loss of muscle memory and perhaps some guy who knows the POISON FINGERS move that can murder a person with a single poke.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Paper Tigers crosses The Karate Kid with one of those movies about aging guys who reunite after a long time to do something that younger guys usually do, like Space Cowboys or Stand Up Guys, stuff like that.

Performance Worth Watching: Uy plays ostensibly the protagonist — Danny is the only character who enjoys any significant development — and he provides a solid foundation for the amiable, light-comedy cast.

Memorable Dialogue: Sifu’s great and mighty wisdom: “Gung fu without honor is just fighting.”

Sex and Skin: None. TBDPFTF: Too busy dodging POISON FINGERS to f—.

Our Take: It’s extremely difficult to dislike The Paper Tigers. It coasts on its genial tone; it inspires some smiles if not necessarily big laughs; the cast has colorful and spirited chemistry; it’s an underdog of a movie that hopefully positions its talented director at the helm of a bigger one. Tran cleverly integrates a few referential Hong Kong cinema moves into his visual style, which is bold, lively and confident.

That said, the movie also adheres to familiar formulas, and I found my attention wavering as it slogged to the end of its 108-minute runtime. Cutting to a crisp 95 minutes would do wonders for it comedically, as some scenes linger when they should snap, and a subplot about Danny’s son getting in a fight at school felt like an unnecessary tangent. But Tran neatly avoids sentimental schmaltz in his they-have-each-other-and-that’s-enough buddy-reunion story. You’ll wish it was a little funnier and a little more quickly paced, but the movie is nevertheless a light, warmhearted watch with plenty of upside.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Paper Tigers is enjoyable enough, and stirs up enough goodwill and positive representation to elicit a recommendation.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Paper Tigers