‘The Vengeance of Fu Manchu’ or — The Curse of Diminishing Returns?
And here is where a sense of decline kicks in.
‘The Vengeance of Fu Manchu’ (1967) suffers from two major set-backs, namely the loss of director of the first two Christopher Lee Fu Manchu films, Don Sharp, along with the issue of a conceptually boring story. It doesn’t stop the movie being fun, but it’s in rationed bursts surrounded by lots of dead time. For the first time you can feel these movies do what they’ve never done before — drag.
Fu Manchu is pissed off at having been blown up again so returns to his home in a remote region of China where he blocks himself off from the rest of the world in order to plan his vengeance against his arch nemesis, Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard. To achieve this he kidnaps a plastic surgeon and his daughter (if you’re a daughterless scientist or doctor in this world then you’re, presumably, completely safe) and tortures the daughter until the surgeon agrees to carry out Fu Manchu’s bidding — to perform plastic surgery on one of Manchu’s Chinese henchmen to make him look EXACTLY like Nayland Smith. Once this evil Smith is in place back in London he will start murdering people hence bringing shame to the detective and Interpol (which has only just been invented that morning) whilst destroying the credibility of the free world’s security network in the process, rendering it useless!
Meanwhile, the real Nayland Smith is kidnapped (he doesn’t have a daughter as far as I know) so his facsimile can infiltrate Scotland Yard. Smith is brought to Fu Manchu’s castle where he is given the chance to join the nefarious criminal mastermind or die. What will happen?!
The answer is — not much. This is primarily down to the idiotic decision to have Nayland Smith replaced for a large chunk of the movie meaning the film, effectively, has no real protagonist. Not only that but having Fu Manchu simply hiding away in his remote kingdom whilst his minions do his work means that the film doesn’t really have an active antagonist either. Factor into this that the fake Smith is simply a silent, inert automaton, and one who is given a lot of screen time, means that ‘The Vengeance of Fu Manchu’ often screams to a shuddering halt. Gone is the pep and light touch of the previous two and, instead, there’s a feeling of sluggish weight both in terms of action and narrative.
There are also a couple of songs (in a Fu Manchu movie?!) that stop the film dead although what’s even more infuriating is that every time the movie seems to pick itself up and get ready to jump into high gear it throws it all away and kills the momentum. There’s a pretty cool karate fight that’s nicely handled but then its straight back to the dead-eyed, silent Smith dragging everything down.
There’s also the fact that Fu Manchu’s plot — replace Smith and destroy his life — is less exciting than Fu Manchu’s usual world domination, blast rays or exotic toxins. It gives it all a very small, almost petty, feel to Fu’s scheme; simple spite has replaced delusions of grandeur.
‘The Vengeance of Fu Manchu’s is a decent watch hampered by an implausible, and somewhat dull, plot along with a lack of action and energy that the previous two had in abundance. Its effective, if uninspired, and possibly works best as an illustration as to why the first two movies worked the way they did. From that point of view alone this is worth checking out.
