This movie with actors from Taiwan, Hongkong and China was one of my favourite movies when I was a little kid. I always liked Asian culture and watched a lot of kung fu flicks with my father. While other kids at elementary school watched Hollywood cinema or cartoons, I watched kung fu movies like this one. I remember that I watched this movie at least three times a year with a girlfriend of mine when I was young and we both enjoyed watching this. Lately, I rediscovered this movie and fell in love with it again.
The story is quite simple. Our main hero helps to hang a villain for his kingdom and the father of the deceased swears revenge and kills the entire family of our main hero. Only his nephew survives in a well after a bloody massacre. The main hero swears revenge and wants to know who is responsible for the bloodbath. He quits his job and leaves his kingdom to seek for justice. But his counterpart sets a prime on his head and the main hero has to face many fighters that hope to kill him and get rich and famous. On his way, he must struggle with many enemies and traps as well as with his young and stubborn nephew that follows him everywhere until he meets with his final adversary.
The movie has many strong points. The fighting scenes and the choreographic work are outstanding and many gifted actors are featured on this film. Sometimes, a few fighting scenes are a little bit exaggerated and artificially flavoured but this is nothing unusual to the genre.
The acting is also very well done and features many very cool characters as the ice cold main hero and his courageous young nephew. On the other side, you have an intriguing mysterious man in black and a young and naive fighter and his beautiful girlfriend that try to kill the main hero. The movie is always entertaining and contains not a single minute of boredom.
In comparison to some other critics, I really liked the score of this film. It features traditional Chinese folk music, electronic pop music and some parts of scores coming from different famous series and movies (for example: Once upon a time in the West). The music always fits in a very harmonic way to the different scenes and characters.
The only negative points I might cite in this movie are some exaggerated fight scenes where people are flying across a sea or through trees and some scenes where people in black fight in a dark alley on a moonless night and where you can only guess what really happens. Sometimes, there are also some characters that appear and fight with the main hero for no apparent reason, for example before the final battle scene. But all these points do no harm to this highly addictive flick that any fan of Chinese culture and tradition and kung fu must see. The movie is hard to find but definitely worth your money and attention if you can get your hands on it.
