San lau sing wu dip gim

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!

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.

I found this movie slightly disappointing.

It seems there are several different strains of HK Action Flicks. Jackie Chan does pure fist/leg martial arts with no wires. Jet Li tends to use more wires, but "Once Upon a Time in China" seemed to be more dependent on the action than the wires. This move depends so much on wires and magic powers that you really don't get very much in the way of good swordplay and kung-fu. It seemed pretty cheesy from the beginning, and I left it on only because I had nothing better to do. Then it started getting good. The plot gets pretty complicated, as you see hidden motivations and conflicting desires causing problems for the characters. Unfortunately, the movie never really capitalizes on some of the things the characters discover, and the ending reveals a mystery they really hadn't set up well, forcing the characters to reveal too much in their dialogue, as in, "You see, this was my plan all along! Now I shall kill you!" Not dull, exactly, but it never fulfills the potential of the plot developments to overcome a cheesy approach to martial arts.

I own this movie on DVD, have watched it several times, and still wouldn't even attempt to give a more in depth plot summary than "There are political factions. They seem to want something. They kill lots of people."

Who knows what this flick is about.

But with the glorious Michelle Yeoh looking especially radiantly beautiful and ripping heads out at the root through the unadulterated power of her fabulous costumes, who cares? Add in the always charming, greatly lamented Tony Leung as her innocuous-secret-identity-guy brother, a plot would almost get in the way.

If you can embrace the sacrifice of story in favor of pure action and character development in favor of raw screen power, you will have a great time watching this movie.

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.