Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

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.

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.

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).

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.

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