The follow-up Chang Cheh's immensily successful and influential The Boxer from Shantung (released earlier the same year and also starring Chen Kuan Tai). The events are set twenty years after those of the previous movie (there's a brief flashback), and tells a similar tragic story of an ordinary man rising to fame in the Shanghai underworld.
While the boxer from the first movie was a country boy who had only recently arrived in the big city, the protagonist of this movie seems to be born and raised in Shanghai. In an early scene, he drives with motorcycle through the patio doors of a house to impress a socialite Lady. Now would a country boy do a thing like that? In other words: we get a different character, played by the same actor in a similar story. By the way, the scene seems influenced by the kind of vehicles French mega star Jean-Paul Belmondo was making at the time and seems out of synch with the rest of the movie, which isn't tongue-in-cheek at all, but dead-serious. Even a scene with Chen Kuan Tai using a bike as a defensive (and offensive) weapon - a scene Jackie Chan must have watched over and over again - doesn't bring any comic relief (which could have been welcome).
Some think this movie is even better than Shantung. It sure is better paced (Shantung was overlong and suffered from a couple of slow stretches), but somehow it seemed less involving, less inspired. What gave the first movie its emotional impact, was this central idea of an inexperienced young man, the new kid in town, ruining his life and that of others while making a career in the underworld. It all feels a bit more artificial here. This doesn't mean that Man of Iron is a bad martial arts movie, it's a good one, with a charismatic star and well-choreographed, furious action scenes.
