<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>Every once in a while a movie like this will come along that makes me question my views on religion. I mean, it seems that a movie like this must be some sort of divine punishment for my lack of faith...but, on the other hand, I don't think even the cruelest, most vindictive and wrathful of Gods would ever allow such a film to be made.
My friend and I rented this film by accident last night as some prodigy at the rental store placed it behind the box for the Jet Li film that we intended to rent: New Legend of Shaolin. By the time we realized the mistake it was too late to take it back, and we figured, what the hell, it's still a Jet Li movie, it must have at least some redeeming value. Oh, how sweet it was to have been so young and stupidly naive - the time before this film raped away all our childish innocence in one jerky, incompetent swoop of the camera.
This is a Chinese movie made in 1993, which is the technological equivalent of 1972 for the rest of the world, and, for those of you unfamiliar with Chinese history, came before the advent of such radical concepts as individual rights, film-budgets, and cinematography. We fast-forwarded through about 94% of the plot, but from what I gathered, it is a story about an old-fashioned, crank-powered film camera (likely a replica of the model they used to shoot the movie), a Russian guy who kills another guy who may or may not be Russian, and Jet Li having sex with his cousin.
Now, granted, the plot wouldn't have been all that bad for a martial-arts action film, had there actually been any martial-arts action in the movie; instead, due to what seemed to be the worst camera work I've ever seen in my life, we get a jumbled mess of body parts hitting other body parts really fast with out-of-sync sound effects. The fight scenes mainly consisted of a shot of a foot hitting a back, cut to the center of Jet Li's chest, cut to a sword from somewhere, SFX: foot hitting back, etc., etc., ad infinitum. I could go on for paragraphs about how the coherency of these scenes could have been improved, but what's the point? If they had shot the film using a rabid chimp with a helmet-cam it would have looked better.
And the special effects were simply astounding. This movie contained wirework that had me yearning for the state-of-the-art technology found in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. The best example of which would be the charming character known as Thunderfoot whose fighting style, due to the marionette-like magic of wires, possessed all the grace and finesse of a man tangled up in the axle of a semi-truck.
All in all, this is a martial arts film that has gone beyond intolerable, flying headlong into the realm of spontaneous rectal bleeding....I give it 2 and 1/2 stars.</div>
My friend and I rented this film by accident last night as some prodigy at the rental store placed it behind the box for the Jet Li film that we intended to rent: New Legend of Shaolin. By the time we realized the mistake it was too late to take it back, and we figured, what the hell, it's still a Jet Li movie, it must have at least some redeeming value. Oh, how sweet it was to have been so young and stupidly naive - the time before this film raped away all our childish innocence in one jerky, incompetent swoop of the camera.
This is a Chinese movie made in 1993, which is the technological equivalent of 1972 for the rest of the world, and, for those of you unfamiliar with Chinese history, came before the advent of such radical concepts as individual rights, film-budgets, and cinematography. We fast-forwarded through about 94% of the plot, but from what I gathered, it is a story about an old-fashioned, crank-powered film camera (likely a replica of the model they used to shoot the movie), a Russian guy who kills another guy who may or may not be Russian, and Jet Li having sex with his cousin.
Now, granted, the plot wouldn't have been all that bad for a martial-arts action film, had there actually been any martial-arts action in the movie; instead, due to what seemed to be the worst camera work I've ever seen in my life, we get a jumbled mess of body parts hitting other body parts really fast with out-of-sync sound effects. The fight scenes mainly consisted of a shot of a foot hitting a back, cut to the center of Jet Li's chest, cut to a sword from somewhere, SFX: foot hitting back, etc., etc., ad infinitum. I could go on for paragraphs about how the coherency of these scenes could have been improved, but what's the point? If they had shot the film using a rabid chimp with a helmet-cam it would have looked better.
And the special effects were simply astounding. This movie contained wirework that had me yearning for the state-of-the-art technology found in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. The best example of which would be the charming character known as Thunderfoot whose fighting style, due to the marionette-like magic of wires, possessed all the grace and finesse of a man tangled up in the axle of a semi-truck.
All in all, this is a martial arts film that has gone beyond intolerable, flying headlong into the realm of spontaneous rectal bleeding....I give it 2 and 1/2 stars.</div>
[b]Sorry, it looks like I'm going to have to kill you in an instant.[/b]
