Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

Sword of Destiny (2016) tries to pick up several years after the events of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) holds again in her hands Li Mu Bai's legendary sword, known as the Green Destiny, and here is where the forced elements starting to emerge... A ferocious villain and his clan is after the sword. A conflicted young couple is needed to enrich the plot and to give a feel of Zhang Ziyi who is missing from the cast. A character who I wont spoil you who he is, played by Donnie Yen, and who has an unbelievable connection with the first movie. And of course the usual revenge sub-plots etc etc.

Unfortunately, the feel of the movie has nothing to do with Ang Lee's multi-awarded film. It feels like a generic wuxia movie. Too much cable-flying, most of it unnecessary if you ask me, uninspiring fights, over-processed and unnatural imagery... and the music, despite the reprize of Tan Dun's original theme from 2000, is not a perfect fit.

Overall: Yuen Woo-Ping, the grandmaster of kung-fu choreography makes a sub-par movie with CTHD2. You might want to check it out, out of curiosity if you liked the original more than 15 years ago. But honestly, despite the return of Michelle Yeoh don't expect much...

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.

Obviously their was a decent production budget and energy spend on this martial arts movie set in ancient China. Much effort went into (re)creating sets, costumes and choreography. That's the good part...

However, it's out of place to go through all the effort to evoke a historical time period, only to let all Chinese characters speak English (in a time period where only very few Chinese intellectuals would be able to speak any other other language than Chinese). Either the producers didn't have faith in a movie audience to read subtitles or to accept a movie with any other spoken language than English. The original movie did manage to do that however: to appeal as well to a mainstream audience AND lovers of exotic foreign language martial arts movies.

Sword of Destiny doesn't do anything which hasn't been done much better before. Martial Arts in itself as a genre, having being so popular mainly in the 70s and 80s has explored about any camera angle, fast montage and special effect. Tarantino already directed the ultimate homage in Kill Bill.

Sword of Destiny, although with some credits to the production in itself never amazes, unless you've never seen a martial arts movie before. Like in the previous Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon there is a lot of cable work and floating going on. As if fast paced and shot martial arts scenes weren't enough, in this series the fighting characters are elevated to near super heroes, resulting in choreography and fighting scenes which aren't credible anymore.

This is exactly where for instance Bruce Lee-flicks were far superior: as a viewer you saw incredible sequences but yet they remained credible. In Sword of Destiny the character has seized to be human and becomes a fantasy.

Sword of Destiny finally ends up being neither: too slick to be accepted by a die hard audience of authentic martial arts movies, too Americanized to appeal to lovers of historical art house costume movies.

Going through all the effort to evoke an ancient Chinese period and let all Chinese characters speak English is simply foolish.

Sword of Destiny is exactly where American mainstream cinema has gone wrong: in a cash-in attempt to 'Americanize' classics in other countries, they end up with would-be blockbusters without soul or authenticity what so ever. You watch it, you forget it: it's not good, not super bad either, it ends up being a movie you hardly remember the next day, unlike the original.

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

Your humble reviewer believes that the destiny of certain very special sequels is not merely to entertain, not merely to make money, but to strike a chord within the viewer that makes you realize how much you enjoyed the original and want to see it again.

So it was that at the halfway point of this movie I decided to go to the Amazon site and order the original CTHD. Only with the perspective of this lop-sided followup can the beauty, the genius, of the original be appreciated.

That said, a lot of top talent try very hard to salvage this title but aside from some amazing fight scenes -- scenes which by themselves are almost worth the price of the ticket -- it just keeps letting you down.

Yen's performance here made me appreciate his restraint in the 3 Ip Man movies even more. And watching the increasingly heavy Jason Scott Lee reminded me that when he first debuted on the scene, he played a very svelte Bruce Lee. And any film with Michelle Yeoh is always worth a look.

Have a glance here, but cherish the original.