Steineded How sad is this?

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Brooklynn There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Charles Herold (cherold) I really can't say much about the story of this film, because honestly I often was unclear on what was happening. There are a lot of people and organizations in conflict plus random fights, although the last part settles into a straightforward rescue movie. Perhaps, since there is some historical basis for this film, it is relying on the Chinese audience being able to fill in the gaps?While muddled as a whole, individual scenes are quite entertaining. The movie has a sprightly, light-hearted start, introducing some amusing characters.There's a lot of very entertaining fight choreography, including a terrific bit with an umbrella that would do Jackie Chan proud. Unfortunately the movie's fight gimmicks don't always work; there's a long fight involving ladders in which the ladders where you can't see why the fighters are so found of using them.Jet Li, the star of this, has been in some of my favorite martial arts films (Hero, Forbidden Kingdom, Unleashed) and I'm always hoping to find something else great with him, so I was excited to hear this was a "martial arts classic." But it's really just okay overall, with a solid start and end but a rather mushy middle.

bcheng93 kung fu movie fans argue who is the best and what are the classic movies, and i'm sorry but jackie chan with his slapstick acrobatics resembling kung fu is not it. i am a fan of jackie chan movies and some of them are quite entertaining but the moves are more acrobatic( he trained in peking opera ), and not wushu based. jet li on the other hand was actually a world champion for a few years in the late 70's and early 80's and actually fought in underground fights. you can tell by the way they move through the action.i rate this as in the top 5 all-time greats of kung fu movies. i personally must have seen this movie at least 20 times over the years and it never gets boring. this is one of the few kung fu movies which stands on its own as also an epic movie and with the kung fu it woulld have been a very good movie also. tsui hark was able to create an epic movie with a tenth of the budget of an American blockbuster epic, which is incredible!the movie itself is based on loose fiction and a lot of the stuff happening really did happened. china at the time was in great turmoil and foreign nations were using this as an excuse to divide china up amongst themselves. this is the backdrop of the story and what a story it is.with jet li in the lead all the fight scenes were meticulously done and there were also 2 jaw-dropping fight scenes which you have to see to believe. the sets were so beautiful and mostly true to that period. instead of slapstick we get real wushu and there was actually a back story to this movie. this is one of 2 movies that defined jet li, the other one being " shaolin temple ", but that one even though its also very famous , it is very low budget and looks it.i just have 2 minor gripes about the movie: 1)the pistols are from like the 1600's, the rifles from 1700's 2)when you see the soles of the fathers shoes you could tell those shoes did not exist in the 1800's.if you call yourself a kung fu movie fan then this movie is a must see!

chaos-rampant I think this is both troubling as a film and revealing of Chinese character. As a standalone, it is I suppose fairly enjoyable, the cinematography is nice, the story long but intimate in spots, the fights some of them amazing. But, this is not just a standalone, it has a rich context - the protagonist is a popular folk hero, the times of foreign oppression and inept administration it depicts were real and left punishing scars in the Chinese soul.Something else bothers though. As a student of the Chinese model, I encounter this elsewhere, I believe it does a lot of bad, and turns away as many people as it brings in. What they Chinese do usually has both hard and soft aspects, Confucius and Tao would be on opposite ends of this, kung fu and meditation. When Western people are exposed to it, say with a film like this, unwittingly we register it as one picture. It endears, it's a scented romance. What isn't so easy to appreciate though is that to get that single harmonious picture the Chinese obsessively flatten their multifaceted experience, this is evident in the continuous reinvention, passionately undertaken, of both their political and martial arts narratives, and of course their penchant for opera. Naturally, corners have to be cut in the name of a tidy narrative.And this carries over in (cinematically) packaging these things in ways that eliminate subtler levels in what they do. Because the harmonizing effort is forcible, it can't help but take out of these things their soft wind, which is their real power in both the Taoist and creative sense. If you accept as I do that wisdom is tolerance and capacity for cognitive dissonance, this artificial harmony wherever encountered dumbs us down.In the film, you have the good sifu vs evil sifu, the good-natured but bumbling disciples, the evil street gang, the cruel army bureaucrat and foreign officials - all of them 'hard' stereotypes from the Boxer era, acted in a hard (external) manner. And I believe the point at some stage was to contrast soft 'chi' based awareness in the Jet Li character with hard 'iron body' kung fu in the rival master as the difference in karmas they set in motion. This has been flattened in favor of more or less the same kung fu.So hard politics, hard acting (mirrored in the opera stage and two 'fake' actors), hard martial arts in the service of mythmaking. Is there anything soft here, internal? The woman. She has come back from the West, straddles both worlds. She has come back with a camera, which she uses to snap pictures.Her eye is 'soft', stills motion, caresses the shadow of the one she loves. Too bad they didn't make more room for this, using it to cultivate dissonance, reflection, innate capacities for clarity and beauty, which could then transfer over to the fights.The music is marvelous though. And the camera glides as though on wires of its own.

bs3dc Once Upon a Time in China is quite simply one of the best films ever to come out of Hong Kong from almost every perspective.Jet Li stars in the role he was born to play (in my opinion), real-life martial arts master, doctor and commander of the local militia, Wong Fei-Hung. Despite not even being able to speak Cantonese his acting in this just using facial expression, and body language is highly impressive, conveying a man of great dignity and command above the real age of Jet Li, answering the critics who considered him too young for the role. It must have been a difficult role for him to take on, with Kwan Tak-Hing (played Wong Fei Hung in around 100 films) and Jackie Chan (Drunken Master I and II) being his predecessors. The story is very complex - possibly a little too complex - and transcends a good many martial arts films whose plots can easily be summed up in a single sentence. Wong Fei-Hung has to deal with American slavers, local gangs, a renegade martial arts master and even his own wayward (but well-intentioned students). On top of this he has to contend with his growing affection for Aunt Yee (Rosamund Kwan) which is important as it is set around the end of the 19th century when there were great social changes in China. This is typified with his relationship with his aunt who is not related to him by blood, but with whom it would be taboo to marry. The fact that this is a series of films allows the relationship to develop also sets it apart from many Hong Kong films where any romances are usually very fast-moving and unrealistic.The rest of the cast is extremely good, slightly more so than later episodes. The wonderfully athletic Yuen Biao plays Leung Foon, a trainee actor who wants to learn kung fu to protect himself - it is a shame he allegedly fell out with director Tsui Hark over screen time as his replacement in subsequent films is comic but has not got the martial arts skills. Kent Cheng is perfect for the role of the larger-than-life Lam Sai-Wing who is Wong Fei Hung's head student. His other students are played with vigour by Jacky Cheung and Yuen Kam-Fai.The villains are suitably colourful, and the lead bad guy played by Yam Sai-Kun is interesting because he is not as two-dimensional as he could have been and is almost a double for Wong Fei-Hung and what he could have become had he gone down the wrong path.The action is superb which is unsurprising considering it is choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping, though critics will still fault the wire-work and use of doubles. The final showdown is a masterpiece of editing as Jet Li was injured and had to be doubled for many of the shots that weren't above the waist, but his fist techniques make up for this. The film has a long running time for a martial arts flick so for once there is plenty of time for story and action. An honourable mention has to go the music written by James Wong, as it is one of the greatest and most memorable of all martial arts theme music.In short they don't come much better than this. People who enjoyed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would probably love this and it should also be seen by anyone who has seen Cradle 2 the Grave and thinks Jet Li can't act. The first 2 sequels for this are also warmly recommended.