Today’s quick review: Crippled Avengers. As punishment for minor offenses, Tu Tin-to (Kuan Tai Chen) and his son Chang (Feng Lu) cripple Chen (Philip Kwok) by blinding him, Wei (Meng Lo) by deafening him, Hu (Chien Sun) by cutting off his legs, and Wang (Sheng Chiang) by inflicting brain damage. The four men join forces and undergo rigorous martial arts training to overcome their handicaps and get revenge.
Crippled Avengers is a martial arts action movie about four fighters hunting after the men who crippled them. The movie takes a simple premise and fleshes it out with a large cast and varied fight scenes. Chen, Wei, Hu, and Wang develop specific fighting styles to compensate for their missing faculties, and the fight scenes explore how these styles work in tandem. Strong choreography and a serviceable plot make the movie worth checking out.
Crippled Avengers takes a different appraoch to its action than later martial arts movies. The fight scenes resemble stage choreography more than real fighting, giving the action a graceful but artificial quality. The upshot is that the feats of acrobatics on display are superb. The cast moves like they were born for it, and the camera rarely interrupts them in the middle of a stunt.
The movie also features a solid plot progression that serves to supplement the action. The story is a basic cycle of revenge, but the escalation from the initial injuries to the training sequence to the series of fights against Tu’s men is satisfying. Viewers who are looking for nuanced drama may be disappointed by the one-dimensional conflict, but anyone who’s focused on the action will find that Crippled Avengers caters to its strengths.
For a martial arts action comedy with similar quality, the same director, and an overlapping cast, try The Five Venoms. For another martial arts movie about young fighters seeking revenge, try Martial Arts of Shaolin. For a more stylized American martial arts movie about a man who fights using prosthetics, try The Man with the Iron Fists.
[7.4 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077292/). I give it a 7.0 for impressive stunts and a thin but adequate plot.