There is a long list of epic fights in fiction, from Luke versus Vader, Rocky versus Apollo, Ip Man versus those 10 black belt dudes. Now, the trailer for the upcoming fantasy film “The Iron Mask” promises a similarly unexpected yet epic fight between action legends Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Fine, the fight probably won’t be that long, and it doesn’t even seem to be a big part of the movie at all. “The Iron Mask” is a Russian-Chinese production that was originally released in China in 2019 under the film “Viy 2: Journey to China,” a follow up to the 2014 film “Viy: The Forbidden Kingdom,” which was loosely based on the novel of the same name by Nikolai Gogol. That’s right, there is another one of these films out in the world. The film is set in the 18th century and it stars Jason Flemyng as an English cartographer sent to map the Russian Far East, and encounters dragons, black magic, and a dragon king? Sure.
The books from which the film is based on is kind of like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” as they star a cartographer who meets several characters from folklore and the public domain. The first story was a horror novella involving a cursed Ukranian forest that inspired Mario Bava’s “Black Sunday,” while this movie seems to introduce characters such as The Man in the Iron Mask, but also Schwarzenegger’s character seems to be named James Hook, though it is unknown whether he’s the famed Captain Hook or if it’s just a namedrop.
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But wait, though Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger are the biggest names attached, the film also stars Charles Dance (“Game of Thrones”) as well as one of the final performances by Rutger Hauer. We’ll have to wait to see how the fight turns out, as “The Iron Mask” doesn’t yet have a U.S. release date, but it arrives in U.K. theaters and on-demand on April 20.
Watch the trailer below:
