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Reviews
Tian mai zhuan qi (2002)
Disappointing, but not surprisingly so
Seeing the commercial for this movie, you know you'll be disappointed with the special effects. If you've never seen an Indiana Jones movie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Seven Years In Tibet, nor any other HK flick, then MAYBE this movie will entertain you. Actually, comparing this to Indiana Jones, Crouching Tiger and Seven Years in Tibet would be insults to those movies. More appropriate would be Relic Hunter, Legend Of Zu, and The Golden Child. The storyline starts out decent enough, but right off the bat you'll see some hokey f/x. For the first half of the movie, the plot unfolds like many Jackie Chan-away-from-HK flix: reluctant hero, naive sibling, overly-evil Caucasian. The next paint-by-numbers HK-flik characteristic: the ol' you-wanna-pull-your-hair-out "why did he do that stupid thing" thing. That leads to the "action" part of the movie and off they go to China ... beautiful scenery a la Crouching Tiger interspersed with Relic Hunter antics. But then the almost-entertaining movie (for a HK flik) just got taken over by people who received new computers for Christmas: it became 98% computer graphics overlayed with the actors swinging on ropes. You'd expect the cheesy latest-tech graphics in Hercules or Xena because they're spoofs, but this $$$ movie ended up like Legend of Zu ... graphics fluff. Oh, the scenes at the end in Tibet? Nice travelogue. Conclusion? (Do you need to ask?) This ain't no Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 2 the Western audience is looking for.
Swiri (1999)
So promising, yet such a disappointment.
I bought this and watched this a couple of years ago and just watched it again. It was the first Korean movie I had seen. Since then, I've enjoyed VERY MUCH Joint Security Area and My Sassy Girl. I don't know why there was so much excitement about Shiri. Was it the first modern-day action movie there? Now, as well as 2 years ago, I still have a bad taste in my mouth after watching it. Despite the overdramatics of spy camp at the beginning, the plot was developing very nicely throughout most of the movie. The everyday scenes in and around Korea was very beautiful. Noticed them eating at Marche, which I do now in Singapore. But by the big shootout near the end, everything crumbles to standard paint-by-numbers HK action flik sequences: good guys outnumber bad 50-to-1 (or 150-to-1) but can only manage to hit kitchen appliances, the bad guys can't miss killing good guys, pistols have 100-shot clips (where do I get one of those?), and personal relationships end tragically (sob sob). Well, happily, the Korean movies I've seen since then are NOT HK-style good-guys-die/crooks-get-away movies. Looking forward to watching more.
Chuen zik saat sau (2001)
MUCH better than "Assassins". Sylvestor who? Antonio who?
Envious assassin who will stop at no lengths to show the #1 assassin and the rest of the world who should should really be #1 ... storyline sound familiar? Ok, so it's not THAT original a story, but this Big Budget (at least appeared to be) HK flick is pretty slick and a lot more fun than Assassins with Stallone and Banderas. Good shooting :P from Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Who knows, Miramax is grabbing anything Asian these days to market in the U.S. (Shaolin Soccer, another good movie), this would do quite well in the U.S.