I had hoped, and thought, that this movie would be somewhat better than the earlier movies of Jackie Chan's impressive career. However, I was sadly disappointed to find out that it was not to be.
The story in "To Kill with Intrigue" ("Jian Hua Yan Yu Jiang Nan") was sort of trying to be everything at once, trying to accomplish a lot, but just ending up in a sort of strange confusion and semi-coherent story. Which made it not overly enjoyable, and quickly had my attention drifting elsewhere, and only pay attention to the movie with half an eye.
And part of the lack of interest in it, on my part, is that the DVD I acquired from Amazon only had a horrible English dubbed language track. I could not even if my life depended on it understand why English dubbing is appealing or acceptable to anyone? It is poorly done, it totally destroyed the feeling (or mood) of the movie, and it just makes it come off as a very low budget production.
Now for the good parts about "To Kill with Intrigue", well you have Jackie Chan in a very unusual role (if you compare it to his other roles throughout his career), as he is not really the goody two-shoes that he usually plays. Plus this movie doesn't have the usual slapstick comedy either. It is a serious movie, and the martial arts in it was actually quite nicely choreographed and executed, whereas many of his movies before this one, the martial arts was horrible staged and rigid.
This movie sort of has a weird mutated mixture of traditional, old Chinese warrior movies mixed with Chinese Opera-like characters. Not really sure what director Wei Lo was aiming for here.
"To Kill with Intrigue" is the type of movie that you watch if you are a hardcore fan of Jackie Chan or old Chinese cinema. For me, this was not one of Jackie Chan's better movie, despite it being a venture away from the slapstick comedy. If the movie only had been with its original language track, it would at least have scored a 4/10 rating, but now has to settle for a 3/10 rating from me.
