Marketic
It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.
Erica Derrick
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
anymouse2
this was a TV movie that was meant to be the 2 hour pilot to a series. The pilot did well in tests but failed on TV. Mostly because Lee very new to Western Society, and Mel Gibson is Mel Gibson; neither knew how to target European and American audiences yet. (But both would eventually learn) The story is a very Asian style of telling, but was released at a time when Western culture still split "Asian" as either Bruce Lee or Karate Kid with no middle ground between them, and a total ignorance of everything else about that entire quarter of the world.If you have even a slim understanding of the Asian style of storytelling (AKA you know more than Naruto and wire-fu) you can find it to be a mediocre flick; the obvious cutting that would have been filled out in a series become glaring.pity; Zane had the skill and really took to the character well enough to make it a fun role.
qwicksilver
Caught this movie on TV, and I honestly didn't even finish it. I don't need to know the ending to the film to give an accurate review mostly because the plot doesn't matter and it's clear that watching more would only sour my opinion more on it.So here's basically the breakdown: The acting's terribly ham-fisted at times.The fight scenes could have been worse but show pretensions clearly beyond the budget.The storyline, while vaguely interesting, is executed in such a way that hurts the teeth just to look at it.Almost everything in the film has obvious pretensions towards being a much better film than it was ever capable of being.What is good about this film is that there certainly was some potential to be a decent television Sci-Fi movie if handled properly. The high concept is just interesting enough to drive the plot along, but it was honestly fleshed out in the worse way possible, making it a simplistic tale about angels and demons, love and hate. Rather than either making the plot less mystical, or adjusting the tone of the movie to be more of a drama, the film tries so hard to approach films that far surpass it (Scenes directly echoed crouching tiger, the Matrix, and I'm sure many other films).Rather than taking the action into the realm of minimalism, the film decides to use special effects that only serve to further exclaim how little money this film was made for. They use the kind of effects that stand out so blatantly as "effects". They are obviously fake, some might be interesting to look at, but it's clear that they have no basis in reality. Good effects make unrealistic situations seem plausible, whereas these are like watching a low quality comic come to life. Even the film effects scream out to be noticed so loud that they prove to be neither interesting, nor original.I can say, however, that the art and set direction are actually not bad. This seems to be the only part of the film that understands its low budget nature, and the set department/DOP seems to adopt the philosophy of any good low budget film, which is to use as many ready-made locations as possible, and to keep the overall look less cluttered and more clean. I only wish that the rest of the film were thinking in such a way.
Amanda
I was drawn to this movie by the fact Jet Li was involved with it. As a big fan of his work I know he always pulls off a great movie. The storyline seemed interesting as well, combining my favourites of action and make-believe.The overall theme of Good and Love overcoming all evil is, one might say, an overused plot line but this had great potential. It was focused around two groups, the evil Shadowmen and the Good Elements. The Elements though were super evolved humans, chosen before birth but in a twist they were lead by a reformed Shadowman, Os. Not just any reformed Shadowman either but the most black hearted of them all, who killed one of the elements and best friend to the leader of the Shadowmen.The basic story is the Shadowmen want to destroy the earth to return home and Os has just 6 days to locate and train the remaining 4 elements to stop him. However it was poorly done. The fight scenes were brief and sloppy as well as being few and far between. There was too much dialogue in this movie and the message of Love overcoming all evil was pounded into you from the first second and quite frankly made you sick of the whole concept. By the end I wanted the Shadowmen to win just to stick it to Os, who came across as a tree-hugging hippie type character.Luckily I only bought this for a couple of quid but I am shocked that Jet Li even came within 1000 ft of this movie. I was severely disappointed with this and suspect that it would have been more enjoyable had I seen it a few years ago when I was unable to judge or care about how good a film was presented.I would only recommend you watch this if it costs you nothing to do so. A severe let down.
Conagher-7
This movie wasn't as good as it could have been. The potential was there, with a decent plot and a few good actors, but it was just not done well.The idea of a group of different individuals putting their differences aside and coming together to achieve a common goal is not new, but it can be done well. Here it was not. I didn't watch the movie for the story, which was good as it was not real good. The whole "love will overcome all" is a good idea, but Os runs it into the ground to the point that he comes across as one of those fake happy lovely-dovey Mormon missionary types that makes most people nauseous.Judging from the commercials and the packaging, I expected this to be more of a martial arts movie. Sadly, where most martial arts movies use the story to connect the fight scenes, this movie apparently forgot that it was a martial arts flick and concentrated on a really weak story at the expense of the fighting. One could count the number of fight scenes in this movie on the fingers of one hand and still have plenty of fingers left. The fights that it did have weren't all that great, either. The fighting relied a lot on wires, which is okay for a fairy-tale or a wuxia movie, but it just looked silly here. Also, it wasn't hard to tell that the actors trained just long enough to pull this movie's few fight scenes off. The actions weren't crisp or particularly fast, and they tried to hide all of this via flickering lighting, jerky camera shots and slow-motion. It was just not good from a martial arts perspective.Unfortunately, most of this 90 minute snoozer is only worth fast-forwarding through, which I did for most of the last thirty minutes, and I'm kicking myself for not fast-forwarding earlier through the totally inane temptation scene. Fast-forwarding through a movie is something I almost never do, but I couldn't take it after an hour of drivel. This movie may have worked as a children's cartoon or some sort of kids live-action movie, but not as a movie aimed at a post-adolescent audience. Mel Gibson I can forgive for being involved in this silly movie, but Jet Li ought to know better. Hopefully he did it as a favor or lost a bet or something.Bottom line - avoid this one.
