07-09-2011, 10:04 AM
The latest Donnie Yen. He plays Guan Yu, the patron saint of martial arts. It's another gorgeous ancient Chinese warfare flick. Great sets and costumes, massive siege battles, extracted from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the part when Guan Yu served Cao Cao and had to fight his way thru 5 passes and 6 generals. Betty Sun (Fearless, Painted Skin) was the love interest. She has impossible huge eyes, like an anime character, and got a little annoying. Zhand Wen plays Cao Cao, and comes off looking strangely like Zhang Fengyi's characterization for Red Cliff. Yen, well, he's at the top of his game, a major Asian star now. He was too gaunt for Guan Yu, IMO, although I did like the notion of how Guan gets his red face (smearing blood over it). Got to hand it to Donnie tho - he's playing all the great martial heroes, one by one. From Chen Zhen, to the god of war, and on to Monkey King. About halfway through, there's an awesome action sequence that's classic Donnie. There's several more fights to follow as he plows through the 6 generals. It's good stuff, but not really DOOM worthy, unless you've read RotTK, which I must now read again as I forgot a lot of this story. If you're a fan of Donnie, the central action portions are really solid, but the beginning is slow and it ends with a thud. Of course, if you know RotTK, which any sinophile knows like Harry Potter, it's not going to surprise you with plot twists. I didn't have subs so it was a struggle to figure out what was going on for a spell, but once I got it placed in the RotTK story line in my head, it came together for me.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse