Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

I don't know how they could take a masterpiece like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and destroyed it. This sequel has nothing of the first movie except for the title.

Maybe i am too harsh, but Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an epic movie, with good story line, legendary character in Li My Bai, great chemistry between characters and epic ending. So based on that my expectations for this movie were high. Plus if you put Donnie Yen, and Jason Scott Lee on top of that you would expect nothing less than the previous movie. But, no. In CTHD 2, the story is terrible, the characters are weak, empty and shallow,there is no connection between them, the directing is bad, and the worst part is, it's in English. The only good thing are the fighting scenes and they are average at best.

So to summarize this movie is an average Chinese kung fu movie with some decent action, sword fighting scenes. As a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel its a big disappointment and not worth watching.

A kind of a throwback with characters that may remind you of Shaw Brothers movies. So it tries to combine the old with some new stuff. Especially the fact that this was filmed in English may alienate some people. But overall I do believe it works. It does have a returning Michelle Yeoh (ageless) who is great in this too. In addition we get Donnie Yen and his craftsmanship.

The action choreography is good and there is flying again (so if you didn't like the first one or thought it was ridiculous and "unreal", don't watch this either). The story is simple and while Yeoh's character admits that at one point, she almost redacts her point entirely at the end. Some may say she changed her mind. Whatever it is, the movie is more than decent enough, while never reaching the heights of the original (no pun intended).

It was a decently enjoyable movie, i probably would have enjoyed it more if it didn't have the crouching tiger, hidden dragon tag to it (as it raised expectations)

Problems i had with it were that it was rather short, there was almost no character development, the story line was quite clichéd and the fight scenes didn't seem as fluid as the original, the musical score wasn't nearly as impressive as the original either.

I am struggling to find anything about the film that is better than average.

Overall not a bad film, just not something i will watch again, A generous 6/10

Amazing action scenes and beautiful cinematography. The fights are choreographed beautifully and even had the added benefit of a little cinema magic to get the superhuman agility of the samurai. The plot was easy to follow and I didn't feel like it relied to heavily on the first crouching tiger so that you could follow along even without having seen it. Enjoyed watching.

I definitely expected this to be weaker, more superficial and more action-obsessed than the original just judging by its trailer, but it was actually worse in many more ways than I had thought of.

First ugly thing that hits you is the ruined color gamut, with all colors squeezed into two narrow bands around red and green (like the "teal and orange" madness that has gripped Hollywood this past decade, but shifted to the side toward red and green). Why must you do this to our eyes, movie studios, why? What have we done to deserve this? What's next, having to buy premium versions of the movie just to get the rest of the color spectrum?

Next comes the complete lack of originality of whatever crumbs of a story there are in there, the entirely boring and soulless dialogue, the cardboard-thin characters that couldn't make you care about them if their lives depended on it, and ending with the mediocre fight scenes. The whole thing was centered around the fighting and they couldn't even get that part at the level of grace and artistry and impact of the fights in the original film.

And to top it all off, they reversed the languages and wrote the original dialogue in English and added Chinese as a dub. This isn't catastrophic - at least the dub is there so you can make the experience reasonably similar to the original -, but it's still somewhat annoying and a bad production choice.

This was a very poor use of Yeoh's potential. All in all, my favourite character ended up being the girl fighter from the villain's crew, who just did her job and did it well, without wasting our time with too much meaningless dialogue or with any other hopeless attempts at gaining a depth the screenwriters never gave her in the first place.