'Man of Tai Chi' is martial arts spectacle

IN "MAN OF TAI CHI" everybody is not kung fu fighting.

One guy is beating the tar out of kung fu specialists with his own version of tai chi, best known for its deliberate movements and meditative attributes.

Wayward student Tiger Chen Linhu (Tiger Chen) speeds it up and uses it to kick ass, to the chagrin of his sorrowful master, who warns the young man that his hubris and aggression will be his undoing.

Whispering in Tiger's other ear - a ruthless businessman (Keanu Reeves, the movie's director), who wants to bring this unusual new fighting style into a private (and illegal) fight network, broadcast online via encrypted signal.

How awful: A private Thunderdome of martial-arts combat, funded and viewed by decadent rich people who wager on the potentially fatal outcome.

Except that it's not completely awful - it's sort of what we want, too, because it's the excuse we need to watch Chen, Reeves's former stuntman and perhaps cinema's foremost martial artist, do his thing.

Reeves, making his debut as a director, keeps the movie simple and stays out of the way. Even, somehow, when he's on screen. The most effective scenes are the simplest, Chen in a blue room, matched against an opponent, floating like a butterfly, stinging like tai chi.

There's a plot in there somewhere - Chen is also raising money to restore his master's temple. How ingenious. Martial arts, extreme temple makeover. It's a date movie.