San lau sing wu dip gim

Butterfly And Sword is about some assassins and a drag queen with a red ball trying to get a scroll for a eunuch, I think. The movie is okay I guess. It does have extremely weird @$$ moments particularly the final fight which I thought was one of the best things I've ever seen in Chinese cinema. The pacing is a bit awkward as the movie will oscillate between love happy friendly romance and human interaction and brutal action filled with dismemberment and fast paced bloodier than a tampon sword play action. Argh! But I felt the whole romance and happy $#!+ was crowding the movie a bit making it hard to maintain interest especially when you don't really care about all the lovey-dovey garbage. Plus the story was a bit incomprehensible. But whatever. At least the crazy fights and the violence was enough to carry the movie through, so there.

Had Butterfly and Sword had anything even remotely resembling a comprehensible plot, I would have no hesitation in awarding it 9 out of 10. There is loads to enjoy in this totally bonkers Wuxia tale; the cast is great and the martial arts set-pieces are completely mad. Unfortunately, from start to finish, I had absolutely no idea who was who, what was happening or why.

However lousy at telling a story it may be, Butterfly and Sword succeeds magnificently in presenting some of the craziest action ever seen on screen. In true Wuxia fashion, every character has the ability to fly, spin acrobatically through the air during fights, and survive all manner of blows that would be fatal to you or I; however, the protagonists in this movie go even further—one guy is even able to launch himself like an arrow, blasting his way straight through the enemy.

The volume of cartoon-style gore on show is also pretty impressive. Loads of baddies get hacked, beheaded and generally mutilated during the fights and in the obligatory bamboo forest scene, pretty much all of the enemy end up impaled on bamboo stalks! If as much time and effort had been spent on the narrative as on the creative martial arts choreography, Butterfly and Sword would be an almost perfect piece of entertainment. As it is, I can't bring myself to give this any more than 6 out of 10.

How can you go wrong when Michelle is at the helm?

Movies that have hit the mainstream like So Close and Crouching Tiger owe it all to cult favorites like this one. This is line jumping and supernatural feats during the core creation. Besides, you'll go crazy trying to figure out how so many people can mistake a HOTTIE like Michelle for a man!

I dare ANYONE to say (and describe) how it was not better than Supercop 2!

Not her best work to date, but well worth the rental. WATCH IT!

Emphatically not for kids, "Butterfly and Sword" is a strange amalgam of brutal and unusually bloody kung-fu, and a complex love triangle... make that parallelogram. Michelle Yeoh, Tony Leung, and Donnie Yen are at their best, and Joey Wong is, as always, nice to look at. This film is infamous for the abruptly truncated ending in the version that was distributed in Hong Kong and on HK DVDs. For the original, which includes the end of the film that is apparently too shocking for HK audiences, look for the Taiwanese version, called "Comet Butterfly Sword."

Confusing at first. It was hard for me to figure out who was on whose side, and the English translations sometimes read as gibberish, but those are petty qualms. The film is really fun to watch. The wire action is cool and over the top. The fight scenes and gore are very indulgent.

The cast are great, especially Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, and Jimmy Lin. This is a hilarious movie. For those into Martial Arts movies, this is worth a look-see.