The Knight of Shadows

Funny, good effecfs despite of the common scenario, still worth for watch

If you do not know this type of movie and expect to see a Chan movie or a typical fantasy movie, then move on. This is a nice movie of it's kind, not for your every day viewer. Nothing unexpected in storyline, but a classical love story.

This is an asian high-fantasy movie rather than a martial arts flick. So adrenaline junkies looking to get their fix on this are going to be disappointed.

This does have a relatively good premise and story. The characters are well-thought out and enjoyable. Unfortunately the English text translation is so extremely bad it is sometimes difficult to follow the story. Typical confusion between he / she / it, extreme mistranslation (in one spot the English is actually written out on-screen and the translation renders it otherwise).

But the romantic sub-plot is quite good, and it has a very Asian ending (avoiding spoilers). It does get to a point at near the end where the on-screen CGI is so over the top it feels more like a Transformers movie than fitting in with the rest of the film. That along with the very bad translating gives this a mere 5-star "mediocre" rating from me.

Those who rated this 1 star... seriously, you're putting this equal to the worst movies ever made? If you can't write better reviews than that don't bother. I'm not sure it warrants the 8 stars some give it, but given a chance and tolerating the butchered translations, it's a mildly interesting 2 hours.

I really liked the mind-altering pixie character. Cute as a button and used well throughout the film, both as plot device and emotional prodding.

This really is an underrated movie. If it were in English it would likely have a 6 to 7 rating I'm certain. Classic Chan with a variant on some Classic Chinese literature, "Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio". It is similar to some of the modern versions of "Journey to the West".

Jackie Chan is a poor scribe who can't sell copies of his books for five cents each. He's also a great and mystical demon hunter armed with the magical Yin-Yang pen, which lets him fight and trap the bad demons and make the good ones serve him. Now he's after mirror demon Elaine Zhong. His newer apprentice, Ethan Juan, won't let him exile her into his book because.... well, that's the story, isn't it.

And a pretty well-told story it is, with some fine sequences of on-screen magic. There's lots of movie flying and, for fans of Jackie Chan, a nice humorous fight sequence about two-thirds of the way through. It's not as extreme and hilarious as the sort he ran through in the mid- and late 1990s, but, hey, he's older than I am, and it's nice to watch him being funny without anyone breaking any bones in the out-take reel.