The Legend is Alive

Many of you will recognize the name of Dustin Nguyen from his "21 Jump Street Days" and wondered where's he been? Well, for a while, he had to take care of personal matters which hindered him from taking a full load of work. He did appear for a while in the TV show "V.I.P." probably just to pay bills. But he's recently been active in films, primarily in his home country of Vietnam.

The latest work is called The Legend is Alive. In it, Nguyen portrays a mentally handicapped adult who also happens to have fighting prowess. There have been a few films with this type of character lately, most notably Jet Li in Danny the Dog and recently the Thai film Chocolate. However, I think where The Legend is Alive differs from those two examples is that Nguyen is playing up the mental handicap more than the fighting prowess. In Jet Li's film and the Thai film, that mental handicap happened to produce a type "martial autism." In other words, their decreased mental ability is made up by their fighting ability. From what I can gather, Nguyen's character has the ability to protect himself, but it is no more special than anyone who has trained hard to acquire those skills; in the meantime--and while he is fighting--his mental & emotional capacity to grasp the situation is just as handicapped as it is when he is not fighting.

The story really focuses on Nguyen's character, named after Bruce Lee, as he tries to keep a promise to take to America his deceased mother, who gave him his moral foundation and made sure he could handle himself when she was gone. A simple act of asking on the streets whether a certain bus went to America plunges him into the world of human trafficking where he builds new relations with others "being sent" to America. What I think is interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any need on the part of the filmmakers to make Bruce some liberator. He is not and can not rescue everyone from the clutches of the black market. He can, however, reach out to people who have reached out to him; an act of kindness received, an act of kindness returned. Simple morals maybe, but certainly nonetheless effective, especially when Nguyen is expertly playing up the emotional aspects of his character's journey. There just happens to be a little martial arts action in there as well.

I would normally link or embed a trailer with this post, but the quality of the video available online is quite poor. If you're interested in watching it, do a search for "The Legend is Alive Trailer" and you should find it. In exchange, here are some stills from the film.





The film has already been released in Vietnam and won numerous awards at their version of the Oscar's known as the Golden Kites Awards. Let's hope the film will find international distribution soon.