‘Enter the Fat Dragon’ Trailer: Legendary Martial Artist Donnie Yen Puts on a Fat Suit

Enter the Fat Dragon trailer

Ever wanted to see martial arts superstar Donnie Yen lead a movie wearing a fat suit? Enter the Fat Dragon has you covered. The chaotic first trailer for this inexplicable action film has arrived, and if this isn’t the weirdest trailer you organically find today, please send me whatever is weirder. You’ve gotta see this.

Enter the Fat Dragon Trailer

Let’s press pause on the whole “Donnie Yen wearing a fat suit” thing for a second and talk about the editing in this trailer. We’ve all become accustomed to quick cuts over the past 20-plus years, but this puts things to the test – it feels like some of these shots only last a few frames, and then Yen’s character is suddenly kicking ass in a new costume and a totally different location. The trailer focuses so much on the fight scenes (which I guess I understand – they’re selling this as a martial arts movie, after all) that it punts on revealing anything about the story, which you have to learn from the official description:

Enter the Fat Dragon is a hilarious chronicle of the events that transformed super-fit super-cop Fallon Zhu (martial arts phenom Donnie Yen) into a glorified records clerk with a major snack cake habit. After a desperate request from an old colleague, Zhu teams up with a wily, wok-wielding restaurateur to solve a mysterious murder—and take his one last shot at regaining both his job and his fiancée.

OK, so let’s get to the fat suit thing. I’ll let others debate whether or not it’s acceptable for performers to wear fat suits in the year 2020, but this actually isn’t the first time Yen has done this. In 2015, he starred in a commercial which featured him in essentially the same makeup job:

Three years ago, word came out that Yen would be starring in a remake of Enter the Fat Dragon, which was originally a 1978 movie directed by and starring Sammo Hung that parodied Bruce Lee’s 1972 movie Way of the Dragon and the “Bruceploitation” movies that came out in the wake of Lee’s superstardom. Yen has explained that his version, which is directed by Kenji Tanigaki, isn’t actually a remake, but just shares the same title. The original version was about an overweight, Bruce Lee-obsessed farmer fighting a band of goons to help his family. Here’s a scene from the Sammo Hung version: