There’s no question that Wu Assassins is very ambitious. Not only does the Netflix’s 10-episode series venture into the very hit-or-miss martial arts genre, it also has a predominantly Asian cast. It’s not shy about its Asian-ness, either, and in fact dedicates a lot of scenes to the Asian-American experience. Unfortunately, everything falls flat because the script lacks creativity and intelligence, the plot lacks coherence with half-baked ideas, and on the whole, everything feels... cheap.

Kai Jin (Iko Uwais) is an Indonesian-Chinese chef in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the adopted son of Triad boss Uncle Six (a very charismatic Byron Mann). As the show begins, Kai has eschewed the gangster lifestyle for his food truck business. But serendipity strikes and Kai meets Ying Ying (Celia Au), a mysterious woman who bestows upon him the powers of the Wu Assassin, an expertise in martial arts and the strength of a thousand monks. He’s tasked with bringing down the Wu Warlords, five individuals who have supernatural powers and control each of the five elements: fire, water, earth, metal and wood.

Kai is helped by his childhood friends: Lu Xin (Lewis Tan), who chose the darker path and operates a chop shop for various gangs, and sibling restaurateurs Jenny (Li Jun Li), who’s an underground street fighter, and Tommy Wah (Lawrence Kao), a recovering heroin addict. Things get complicated when Uncle Six’s ambitious right-hand woman, Zan (JuJu Chan), rival gangster Alec McCullough (Tommy Flanagan) and undercover cop Christine Gavin (Katheryn Winnick) join the party.

The premise is simple enough and it’s easy to see where the inspiration draws from: Hong Kong. Its liberal use of Cantonese dialogue aside, it also features many of the same tropes: almost every character knows some sort of martial art, filial piety is a recurring theme and close friends are treated unconditionally like family, among others. It doesn’t stray far from the formula, but what you get is a pretty hackneyed plot, except that there’s very little coherence from scene to scene, much less episode to episode.  

Why does Kai serve his food truck fare on actual plates? Why is he actually the chosen one? How does time travel actually work? Why do some Wu Assassins and Warlords live longer than others? Why can the Wood Wu heal himself but others can’t? When did Ying Ying learn Gaelic? What do the Wu Warlords really want? Why do all Asian women have to dye their hair to be edgy? Did they really pay that much in music royalties that they just had to lay down a hip hop track down for every scene?

And the most glaring question of all: Is Kai Jin actually a hero!?

(Spoiler alert)

The show made a point that he eschewed violence and that he was chosen as the Wu Assassin because he had a heart of gold. This is a guy who kept saying “I’m just a chef” to anything that required him to hurt someone, but in the final climax Kai murders McCullough in front of his family, and McCullough’s a bad guy who… doesn’t seem all that bad? For all his Scottishness (accent and whiskey and all), all McCullough wanted to do was return to his long-lost family in the 16th century, the space-time continuum be damned.

The show isn’t all bad because at the very least I felt compelled to finish it. I appreciate its ambitious international slant, speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian and Gaelic, and the fight choreography is fast and vicious, mostly thanks to Uwais, perhaps the closest thing we have to a Jackie Chan or Jet Li in western cinema. The food looks good, too. Winnick’s character has an interesting arc as well, but it’s unfortunately buried by the sheer ridiculous of her undercover name (CG), and a final exchange between CG and Lu Xin just feels bizarre; they kiss even though there were minimal signs they would hook up, and then she, a cop, steals a car from him, a car thief.

This 10-episode show, with a two-part finale, featured six different directors and it really shows. There’s little connective tissue in style and tone, and even simple things like the on-screen text can’t stay consistent. Key characters such as the Water Wu and Metal Wu are introduced too late, while the Earth Wu practically gets an entire episode of his own. It also tries to address racism and racial identity, but the message is never clear; its only redemption is that it leads to some good fight scenes.

Too little of the plot and characters made sense to help elevate the show, and early reviews, which only covered the first three episodes, didn’t have a chance to fall into any of the many holes that become bigger as the show progressed. Perhaps it was a victim of hasty production; ordered by Netflix in June 2018, filming began later in August, but some of the castings weren’t even announced until October and January. It wold be unfortunate if this was the case because there was certainly a lot of missed potential. It is just two reviews shy of being certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but 83 per cent is also a very, very generous score.

Wu Assassins: Season 1 gets two stars out of four.