Flying Centipede
aka Fei tian wu gong aka 飞天蜈蚣
1994
Directed by Qingguo Sun
Flying Centipede is a guy who likes to dress up as a Batman copy, except he looks more like a Mothman and call himself Flying Centipede for some reason. Flying Centipede also machine guns down lots of cops, instantly making his hero status questionable. Maybe if we were told all these guys were corrupt cops, it would be better, but instead Flying Centipede is just painted as a villain despite being a super hero. And as this is a Mainland China production, we can’t have villains get away with their crimes. What kind of moral standard is that? So everyone dies. Spoiler alert!
Thanks to our crack research team, we were able to find….not much about Flying Centipede. Time to fire the research team, or at least force them to learn Chinese.
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Flying Centipede machine guns down a whole herd of cops. And laughs. Besides letting his wires show as he flies around, Flying Centipede also robs people. He takes down a Russian Roulette gambling den. That makes one wonder…how could a Russian Roulette gambling den operate? Wouldn’t they run out of competitors after a few games?
Flying Centipede has a gunfight with what is later shown to be cops, he escapes on his motorcycl—I mean Centipede-mobile!
The police team put together to take down Flying Centipede is: Ouyang, Hua, Fatty, and a guy with Long Hair. They have a Chief, and their Chief has a hot secretary who gets her own saxophone music. Because she’s Ailina!
Ouyang enters an old house and encounters Black Widow, a woman with a black cape who he seems to know (as Black Widow, not as her previous identity) Black Widow speaks to him from a high balcony. She brings out a lot of gang members to shoot up the furniture surrounding Ouyang, but miss him. I guess that’s one way to ensure you can redecorate! All her gang members have two black marks drawn across their face. Ouyang is unarmed, but grabs a machine gun from one of the gang members and manages to shoot a whole ton of the gang members despite all of them having machine guns as well. He escapes.
Ouyang is aided by his female friend Ailina, who takes him back to her place, which is huge AND she has a painting of Ouyang for some reason. She’s also a big fan of Mariah Carey’s song Hero, as it will be playing in the background. Something is said that causes her to lock herself in her room laughing, while Ouyang has to pick the lock of the house to get out of it, she won’t leave her room. What kind of house has locks on the inside?
Later, Ailina meets her boss the Chief at a hotel (or a hotel playing his apartment due to budget concerns), he’s trying to seduce her with jewels and daterape drugs, but she switches drinks and he ends up getting the roofie. What a great boss!
Ailina returns to her place, revealing the laughing we heard earlier was a tape recording she played to fool Ouyang so she could sneak out and trick her boss. That was rather complicated and unnecessary, but okay. Remember when this movie was about a guy named Flying Centipede?
Ouyang makes breakfast for Fatty and Hua as Ace of Base’s All That She Wants plays in the background. It’s a clue! Okay, maybe not.
The cops infiltrate a gambling den, but everyone is gassed and Flying Centipede shows up to steal the money. Flying Centipede tries to escape by motorcycle, but Ouyang has sabotaged it and out come 50 cops to arrest Flying Centipede. So the whole plan was to just hang around somewhere shady until Flying Centipede robs it. Got ya.
Flying Centipede escapes by flying up into the air (with the motorcycle and Ouyang in tow) and flying over the cops. Ouyang and the motorcycle get dropped and Flying Centipede gunbattles the cops. Flying Centipede hitches a ride on top of a passing car, the driver not even noticing for the longest time. When they do, the driver faints, so Flying Centipede steals the car and then tosses grenades at the pursuers.
Fatty, Hua, and Ouyang walk to a mansion where the Chief is partying it down with high society, Ailina on his arm. Ouyang manages to get a blood sample from Flying Centipede, who I guess was hurts during the firefight. Thanks for letting us know, movie!
More boring plot stuff happens until Ouyang visits Ailina at home again and is attacked by a rogue remote control car! That situation is defused quickly, so he has a nice chat with her, which quickly escalates into an argument until she stabs herself in the arm with a dart. He laughs and leaves, but she then reveals to the audience it was a trick dart. Yep.
You were so fooled, don’t deny it.
Next up is some sort of woman auction for charity where various model-types are paraded before rich dudes who bid on them, and cops lie in the wings prepared for Flying Centipede trouble. Flying Centipede does arrive to make trouble, dropping in after the second girl is auctioned off, complete with a suicide bomb belt. Thus, instead of the cops shooting Flying Centipede, Ouyang just cuts off the belt and they have a knife fight. None of the cops bother to shoot Flying Centipede after the bomb is cut loose.
Flying Centipede escapes via gasbomb, then flies into his remote controlled, rocket powered, bullet proof jeep that has twin cannons built into the front and escapes.
And the jeep has rockets.
What is this, Axe Cop?
Black Widow’s gang then attacks the jeep, Flying Centipede manages to shoot dozens of them while not getting hurt despite it being an open backed jeep. Maybe it has invisible force fields as well! The jeep is finally blown up, but Flying Centipede escapes because the movie still has a ways to go, though he is injured.
Ouyang closes in on the injured Flying Centipede, and discovers that he is Ailina! That’s a twist that would have been more shocking were there other male characters to be suspects. The rest of the police have Ouyang bugged, so they hear all about Ailina being Flying Centipede. Ouyang fixes her leg, then the police swarm in. Ouyang is still good enough friends with Ailina to turn his back on the police and fire back at them. But the two are surrounded, there is no way out.
Except suicide bombing! Which the two do, so they die. Hey, you can’t have criminals living at the end of a movie! They stood against law and order and rich people! The public might get ideas and overthrow an oppressive regime.
Flying Centipede is part of our Batmania Series.
Rated 6/10 (Chief, cop who is barely in film, the hooker, the driver, the guy, Fatty aims!)
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