Starring Jet Li. Rated 14A.

Wushu, the acrobatic display version of Chinese martial arts, has been the essence of Jet Li's fantastic career. He began winning wushu tournaments as a child prodigy before becoming a national team coach and then a film star. Today, at age 43, he has announced that Fearless will be his “final martial-arts epic” . The phrasing does give Li some wiggle room to do action movies with kung fu in them, but as far as wall-to-wall wushu performance goes, Fearless is meant to be his swan song.

With Ronny Yu enlisted as director and Woo-ping Yuen as fight coordinator, Li has brought his considerable abilities as athlete and actor to bear on the character of Huo Yuanjia, the real-life Chinese master whose defeats of foreign fighters made him a national hero in 1910. In this version of the story, Huo's gift for single combat is so flawed with ego and anger that he boxes himself into rash actions and then a nervous breakdown. It is not until he learns to relax and stop competing with others that the hidden, peace-bringing essence of wushu is revealed to him.

For audiences, this revelation simply means that Huo winds up kicking butt with a slight smile of compassion and forbearance instead of a vicious scowl. There might be more philosophical nuances available, but Fearless has been so tightly edited (trimmed to 104 minutes from 143, thereby losing much of Huo's early life and an entire subplot built around Michelle Yeoh) that we mostly just get the fighting.

It's spectacular fighting, to be sure. Woo-ping, colossus of martial-arts choreography, really pushes the aging Li. Huo is almost exclusively a tournament fighter in Fearless, so instead of using differing backdrops and props, the core of each fight is in the variety of styles and weapons. Opponents come at Huo with swords, pikes, sticks, and, of course, bare fists. The fights are realistic by Woo-ping standards; there is some noticeable speed-up and, of course, everyone attacks singly in melees, but nobody starts flying into the bamboo groves.

Fearless culminates in a showdown with a Japanese fighter who embodies Bushido, the warrior code of honour, and who is thus more of a kindred spirit to Huo than a foe. It's a pretty good fight, mostly because of the dramatic tension involved. But for me, the real peak was the middle section, when Huo flees the gladiatorial life for a rural village. This action-free part could strike viewers as a tedious digression, but this was when the movie slowed down to show us Jet Li's vision of wushu as life: not being bad-ass, just being.