01-22-2020, 11:27 PM
Kingdom of Blood (2014)
Actually, there wasn't that much blood in this. Definitely not a kingdom's worth. Actually, this was The Four 3, the threequel to The Four. I watched it on Amazon Prime because I was reviewing some Crystal Liu flicks in anticipation of Mulan and it took me a bit until I figured out this was the threequel. I pity anyone trying to watch this as a stand alone film. It hardly makes a lick of sense, like I imagine watching Endgame would be like if you didn't know any of the characters or have seen any of the other films. I never saw The Four 2, but apparently Crystal wasn't in that one, which makes even less sense. That installment must have covered a lot of ground that was carried over into this one. But I hardly remember the first one, so it didn't really matter.
This film is opulent in costume, sets and CGI, but there's a lot of talking and the fights are a lot of CGI qi blasts. Crystal's character mopes through most of the film, but she can throw shuriken from her hair to take out the legions of red ninjas that keep attacking the four like CGI snowflake dandruff. Her performance is lackluster. I got lost in what was happening - they were protecting the Emperor and the red ninjas have these zipgun-like pipe firearms and durian-like grenades that explode with CGI fire. There's a lot of bad wire work where they didn't even try to make the trajectories look convincing. There are sword fights, all accentuated by colorful CGI qi smoke. Collin has cool tattoos. Anthony Wong has a granny queue and eats a lot of hot pot. In fact, there's a major fight where he just keeps eating hot pot while the others kill a lot of red ninjas. The villain is a white eyebrow qi vampire. I'm not sure what happened in the end. I might have dozed off a few times.
Not DOOM recommended.
Actually, there wasn't that much blood in this. Definitely not a kingdom's worth. Actually, this was The Four 3, the threequel to The Four. I watched it on Amazon Prime because I was reviewing some Crystal Liu flicks in anticipation of Mulan and it took me a bit until I figured out this was the threequel. I pity anyone trying to watch this as a stand alone film. It hardly makes a lick of sense, like I imagine watching Endgame would be like if you didn't know any of the characters or have seen any of the other films. I never saw The Four 2, but apparently Crystal wasn't in that one, which makes even less sense. That installment must have covered a lot of ground that was carried over into this one. But I hardly remember the first one, so it didn't really matter.
This film is opulent in costume, sets and CGI, but there's a lot of talking and the fights are a lot of CGI qi blasts. Crystal's character mopes through most of the film, but she can throw shuriken from her hair to take out the legions of red ninjas that keep attacking the four like CGI snowflake dandruff. Her performance is lackluster. I got lost in what was happening - they were protecting the Emperor and the red ninjas have these zipgun-like pipe firearms and durian-like grenades that explode with CGI fire. There's a lot of bad wire work where they didn't even try to make the trajectories look convincing. There are sword fights, all accentuated by colorful CGI qi smoke. Collin has cool tattoos. Anthony Wong has a granny queue and eats a lot of hot pot. In fact, there's a major fight where he just keeps eating hot pot while the others kill a lot of red ninjas. The villain is a white eyebrow qi vampire. I'm not sure what happened in the end. I might have dozed off a few times.
Not DOOM recommended.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse