Di Renjie: Shendu Long Wang

There are plenty of entertaining action scenes in this movie, ranging from wire fu fighting to large scale CGI-monster fighting. These are imaginatively filmed and have some nice touches, even if here's nothing as good as the best action scenes from the previous Detective Dee movie, Phantom Flame.

In between action, there is a very poorly told story.

Actually, "story" is an exaggeration. It's more like a collection of incidents told in a particularly order. Everything just kind of happens. A ship battle results in disaster! A woman in a mask is in trouble! There's a merman! There are bandits! There's a new detective! There's a swimming horse! There are poison flowers! Everything is introduced by someone just saying, here is this thing that we need right now.

There's a general rule in film that if the hero is going to pull out a gun in the final act, you want to establish that he owns a gun earlier on. That doesn't happen in this movie. Instead, there's a problem, and suddenly someone says, I know who can help, or, I've got the solution right here, or, the solution is at this place let's go right now.

This is how a ten-year-old writes a story.

No character development, little motivation, no real coherence. Dee's Sherlock Holmes deductions are generally unpersuasive.

It's a dumb story, badly told, but the action scenes almost make up for that. Almost.