Michelle Yeoh cut out of Jet Li's Fearless

Who would have expected Michelle Yeoh, one of the biggest name actress in Asia, to get cut out of Fearless? Ronny Yu, the director of Fearless reduce the length of its running time from 143 minutes to 103 minutes. Some of the deleted material included a fight scene of Jet and a Thai Boxing champion.

.... Michelle Yeoh doesn't hold a single screen frame in the movie. Some martial arts scenes involving Jet Li were omitted as well. Because of the deletion, Jet Li went to Hong Kong especially to say sorry to Michelle Yeoh, and the actress expressed her understanding regarding the omission and says that she is still willing to co-star with Jet Li next time.

In the original version of Fearless, Michelle Yeoh's character as Miss Yang is a martial artist from the modern time who tries to pursuade the Official Olympic committee to include Martial Art into their event. There are two picture from this scene here.

I'm all for editing a film if it means improving the quality but taking out a fight scene, especially with Yuen Woo Ping as fight choreography may mean we might miss out on something entertaining. A bad editing job can ruin the film by taking out inportant scenes for character development (**cough** Seven Swords **cough**). On the other hand, a good editing job may improve the pace by getting rid of unnecessary parts. Perhaps down the road, the distributor will release an uncut version DVD with all the deleted scenes intact.

Source: crienglish.com, michelleyeoh.info