Supelice
Dreadfully Boring
Megamind
To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.
Doomtomylo
a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.
BA_Harrison
Chow Si Kit (Jet Li) is a writer of serial adventures who imagines himself as the hero of his stories, brave archaeologist King of Adventurers. Recently, Chow Si Kit has been suffering from writer's block as a result of his marriage problems with wife Monica (played by the lovely Rosamund Kwan), but receives help from his friends when his back is turned, making the King of Adventurer's latest exploits a little more outlandish than usual.I'm a massive fan of martial arts star Jet Li, and director Siu-Tung Ching's A Chinese Ghost Story is one of my all-time favourite HK movies, but with Dr. Wai, the pair have managed to deliver one hell of a dreadful film, a shoddy mess of ill-conceived comedy and action scenes that seem to have been edited together completely at random. I defy anyone to make sense of this movie, particularly if, like me, they're watching with English subtitles, the film boasting some of the worst subs I have ever tried to read.Cutting between Chow Si Kit's real life and that of his imaginary character, Dr. Wai pays little attention to logic or narrative flow. The visuals are stylish, as one might expect from Siu-Tung Ching—a lot of time and money has clearly been spent on creating a spectacle—but it's all so incredibly slapdash that none of it works. On the contrary, the film proves extremely tiresome, despite such lavish nonsense as a giant runaway metal bull, a steam locomotive crashing through a town, a mid-air encounter with a man-monster on a crashing plane, and a set-to with flaming whip-swords. Despite such adversaries as a team of ninjas, a pair of sumo wrestlers, and Billy Chow, the showy kung fu fight scenes also fail to impress thanks to an over reliance on ridiculous wire-work.I've seen Dr. Wai described as a Chinese Indiana Jones, but to be honest, the best bits of Dr. Wai aren't even as good as The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull at it's worst, which says a lot.
Dave from Ottawa
This wonderful adventure comedy is filled with eye-popping action and big budget sets and other top line production values, but what really makes the movie is the fact that the main story is framed within another even funnier story. You see, Dr. Wai, China's answer to Indiana Jones, is a fictional creation of author Jet Li, who has writer's block and is facing a deadline. So, his two idiot assistants and soon-to-be-ex-wife 'help' him by writing in parts of the story while he sleeps, causing the main story line of 'Dr. Wai' to go off in wild directions, and causing characters to shift from good to bad and back again. As a straight adventure movie, this is fine entertainment, but as a comedy about the creative process it is very clever and quite effective. Each of the four writers has his/her own slant and makes the story different by their contributions, and yet it all comes together smoothly. Plus, the mix of comedy, romance, historical fiction and martial arts action meshes well, something that is not often the case in Hong Kong pictures.HIGHLY recommended for anybody who likes Jet Li, action movies in general, or even movies about writers. This one is smart, well-formed entertainment.
david-sarkies
Woah, what a brilliant movie. This movie was the movie that made me want to get cable TV because world movies was advertising it, and it caught my attention immediately. I didn't end up getting cable because not only did I find this movie at my not-so-local video store, but I discovered that it had yellow subtitles - which are far better than the white ones that are found on most Chinatown videos.Now, I at first thought that this movie was a simply Indiana Jones adventure movie, which was one of the reasons that I wanted to hire it. There was a lot of similarities between this movie and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the thing is that this movie was a thousand times better - Harrison Ford was never that great a martial artist.The difference with this movie is that it jumps between the 1930's and the present day. Dr Wai is actually a script being written by a company and the writer is in the middle of divorce and has lost all will to right, so his assistants take the job of writing it for him, but when he sees it going a way he doesn't like, he takes over and moves it to a more acceptable place, then others come along and add their own bits to the story.The writer of the story is a geek (though Jet Li doesn't come across as a geek) and so are his co-writers. Every character in the present era have duplicates in the story, though this duplicity becomes less substantial as the characters being to take on their real names and real roles. Dr Wai is about dreams and how we place ourselves into our own dreams, a dream of what we want to be is true. Here the geek, who could not hurt anybody, is a rough, tough, adventurer king who is a whizz at martial arts. His wife, Monica, is a bitch queen who controls the Japanese soldiers in China. Yet when others take over, their perception of Monica take over, and so does their perception of Dr Wai. The scene where he drives a steam train through the town is a classic scene of where another aspect of Dr Wai emerges.The movie itself seems predictable, but we don't watch Hong Kong movies for their unpredictability (actually we do, because there are a lot of unpredictable aspects to their movies) but we watch them for their action, and Dr Wai delivers. It has every thing from ramming a steam train through numerous buildings, jumping out of a burning aeroplane, fighting a monster who is in fact the bad guy who was mutated, and ancient artifacts that are needed to be retrieved. This movie has it and this movie seriously rocks.
drngor
This movie is a fascinating film. First of all, the plot is very original. I liked the story-within-a-story approach to the plot. It deals with an adventurer going up against the Japanese for a mythical scripture. The events of the story parallel the life of the author of the story. What I liked about this film were the fight scenes. Most of them were short, unfortunately. However, they were fairly original. The viewer gets a chance to see Jet Li use tai chi, a chain, flaming swords, and his lethal feet. My only complaints were the fights scenes weren't that long. Otherwise, it's an entertaining film.
