Lang zai ji

I purchased this movie from Amazon because I overly enjoy Asian cinema and also because Maggie Q is in the movie. From the DVD cover it would seem that this is a Chinese epic movie, but the truth is far from it. This is a story of doomed love and an ancient curse. Yeah, still does sound interesting, but this movie was one of the slowest and boring Asian movies that I have seen for quite a while.

The storyline never really got up into proper speed to make it interesting, and the plot was just too dull. And this was ultimately the downfall of the movie.

As for the acting, well lets just say that there was nothing impressive or memorable about this. And Maggie Q wasn't up to her usual level here; perhaps because she had nothing to work with from the script.

There were some adequately executed scenes throughout the movie, but the overall result was just a slow paced movie which had very little to offer, and as such then not even those good scenes really did much to raise the level of the movie.

Of course it is utopia to think that every Asian movie will be great, and "The Warrior and the Wolf" was a wide swing and a miss.

Nice poster, nice trailer, disaster of a film. I didn't expect to discover something so bad so early in the year, but I did. If you're looking for a film that's self-indulgent to the point that the narrative doesn't make sense, nor even attempted to tell a proper story, then look no further than Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Warrior and The Wolf.

If there's only one plus point, then I'd say to watch this for the lusciously beautiful cinematography which captured plenty of postcard picturesque landscapes that will take your breath away, and one action scene involving a large stampeding pack of wolves. Otherwise, the film is wrong on many counts, starting with the casting of art house darling Jo Odagiri opposite Maggie Q, both of whom cannot speak Mandarin and had to rely on dubbers to speak on their behalf. Which of course is a curious case of casting, since I for one amongst the audience gets disturbed when the lip movement doesn't sync with dialogue.

Why these two were chosen I have no idea (Maggie Q replacing Lust, Caution's Tang Wei actually), but probably because of the fact that the film contained rape scene after rape scene, that it really went overboard. What more in a very uncreative, repetitive coming from behind each time, that I wonder what Tian Zhuangzhuang actually wanted to infer from gratuitously boring sex that never seemed to know how and when to end.

Based upon the short story by Japanese writer Yasushi Inoue, the film is set during the warring states period, and tells of the tale of a warrior Lu Chengkang (Odagiri), an indecisive chap who one day on his way home with his troops, chance upon the nomadic Harran tribe, and forces his way to a woman, played by Maggie Q. To follow the story is extremely tiring because the narrative flits back and forth with nary a proper transition to cue you in, and made worse by Odagiri having to play his character from hero to cad, from determined leader to indecisive chap.Maggie Q fared no better though, and had absolutely zero chemistry with her co-star.

Then there's the myth inserted that the Harran people were once wolves, but at this point you'll probably give up by the lacklustre storyline, the needless graphical sex (with blink and you miss peekaboos) that had the lovers just go on continuously like jackrabbits, and wondering just what everyone was possibly smoking to have had this project green lit and shot. You'll wonder what it's angle is about, and just what it was trying to achieve with bad filming techniques making its convoluted narrative worst off.

You have been warned to skip this.

For a start, this is not a martial arts movie although I did discover it while browsing through the martial arts section of a online retailer.

This movie is short, has very little dialogue and the plot is vague at best.

Because of the lack of dialogue it is very difficult to get a feel for any of the main characters or a involvement in what little story there is.

Don't let the fact that it is from the same producer as Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fool you into thinking this movie could be any good.

THE WARRIOR AND THE WOLF is a beautiful film to look at. The lush cinematography with its wide landscape shots of endless expanses of wilderness, hilly terrain and distant mountains is a glory to behold. The colours are vivid and the director has a real eye for nature's beauty. Wolves play a large part in the film's background and they've never looked so appealing as they do here. The addition of a wolf pup to the storyline only adds to that feeling.

A shame then that in all other respects this is a dog, rather than a wolf, of a film. It starts off muddled, with murky choppily-edited battle sequences and a disjointed feel to the narrative. The erstwhile hero of the piece is a pacifist shepherd one moment and a ruthless leader of men the next. I didn't have a clue what was going on in regards to the historical backdrop and it's always a giveaway of poor writing when they have to keep including on-screen text at regular intervals to tell the viewer what's supposed to be going on.

After half an hour or so of this, the action shifts to a supposedly cursed village where the lead character meets a woman and rapes her. Then he rapes her again, and again after that. Eventually, the woman falls in love with her attacker, a plot point that is so repellent as to be purely offensive. The ending of the film just peters out with no real explanation of what's happened or what we just watched. Odagiri plays the lead with the same stony-faced expression from beginning to end and Maggie Q is relegated to a window-dressing role with pretty much all of her scenes taking place in the bedroom. If you're looking for a decent Chinese historical then give this one a wide berth.