Dragon Gate, La légende des sabres volants

During the Ming dynasty, the corrupt imperial eunuchs are using their powers to wrongly accuse government officials and taking over the country. The eunuchs are divided into the old East Bureau and the newer West Bureau as the emperor's all knowing spies. Zhao Huai'an (Jet Li) defeats the dictatorial leaders of the East Bureau. The West Bureau led by Yu is more skilled and chases after Zhao Huai'an. The Emperor's chief concubine Wan refuses to let any other maids get pregnant. Pregnant maid Su Huirong escapes and gets rescued by a Zhao Huai'an impostor. Zhao Huai'an sees his impostor and Su Huirong chased by the West Bureau. They head out west and end up in the desert outpost Dragon Gate during a sand storm. There they find bandits, Mongols, crooks, thieves, and rumors of a hidden treasure.

This starts off as a battle between Zhao Huai'an and eunuch Yu. However the story keeps adding characters. It's not incomprehensible but it is a disjointed way of story telling. The movie has plenty of CGI fights and big scenes. I'm willing to go with it until the various groups gather at Dragon Gate and I'm forced to more or less give up. It becomes a mess and I stop caring about half the people in this movie.

I find this film much better than the original. In the original the fights were too weak and fake. Here the fights have more power, although the one in the Cyclone was weakened by not so good special effects. Still I must completely disagree with a reviewer who almost destroyed this movie with his comment about too many special effects. "Thanks" to him I was imagining something terrible and I am glad to have watched the film! I think who saw the "New Dragon Inn" will enjoy this film more, because he will know some of the story, and of the Characters. There are better films of course, but this is a good movie and absolutely deserves to be watched, if you like intrigue and martial arts. Characters are good, the plot is not great but IMO better than in the original, and the style of fights, even if not the best, is for me better than in the original, because more appropriate to what I started to like since when I watched Hero. I would give it 7.5 if I could.

This movie is directed by the legendary Tsui Hark, features one of my favourite actors with Jet Li and is about Chinese legends and myths. This sounds quite promising but the final result is only of an average quality and therefor rather disappointing.

The main problem is that Tsui Hark and Jet Li have become older but especially the director forgot to progress. He still does his movies the same way he did it in the late eighties or in the early nineties when they became international blockbusters. This style simply fails to impress nowadays. The choreographies are still bombastic and detailed but they feel even more exaggerated and artificial than usual because this movie is completely overloaded with special CGI effects. Jet Li has also become older and doesn't do the impressive fighting scenes he did in the past. He is quite underused in this flick.

All these things wouldn't be so bad if Jet Li incarnated a good character. In movies such as "Fearless", he proved that he is not only an excellent fighter but also a credible actor. If Tsui Hark had created an intriguing story, the high amount of effects wouldn't have harmed this movie. That's what the main problem is. The movie includes no interesting story line and is rather confusing. The story is very tough to follow because there are many impostors and conspiracies going on which would normally be interesting but as the amount of intrigues is too elevated, the formula simply doesn't work and one gets quite mixed up in the end. A few potentially interesting characters play only minor roles such as the Tartars while I feel almost no empathy with the main actors. Jet Li's acting remains faceless and if there are a few good actors in this film, then these are the female ones such as Xun Zhou and especially Gwei Lun-Mei.

Both Tsui Hark and Jet Li must though change their styles and skills to still create stunning movies these years. Both deliver a rather lukewarm performance and can't convince. The movie kicks off with a few interesting scenes and special effects but as soon as the story takes places in the desert tavern, the movie gets worse. The effects in the final third of the film are overwhelming and unnecessary and make the whole thing rather hard to sit through as it feels like a cheesy Walt Disney production. Any fan of both the main actor and the director should go for the original movies and ignore this one. The People's Republic of China seems to do the same mistakes as Hollywood these days and invests in useless remakes and sequels instead of focusing on fresh stories which I simply can't support as the originals were way better and innovating for their time. This here is for true fans only.

Following Dragon Inn this film takes visual effects so freaking far that they overshadow and ruin the majority of all fights scenes in the movie. I love movies like House of Flying Daggers, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and classics like Enter the Dragon. This has none of the redeeming qualities of those movies. I watched this mainly because of Jet Li's presence in the cast, and sadly that didn't help. His fights are also injected with too much CGI, and over done wire effects. I would have hoped he would pick a better film to make his return into wushu epics. I will go watch Hero or Fearless now to wipe my mind of this general bs. Overall 5/10 and I will, sad to say, not be buying this on bluray or DVD. What a disappointment.

Tsui Hark goes back to the well to draw fresh inspiration, returning once more to King Hu's classic Dragon Gate Inn - which he already remade rather wonderfully in 1992. The story is given a fresh set of details to flesh it out, but the basic skeleton remains the same - evil eunuchs, patriotic rebels and independent forces of uncertain allegiance all converge on the eponymous inn, where identities are masked and secrets concealed until a game of wits allows the various parties to ascertain where they all stand - and exactly whose ass they need to kick.

This is not the first time that Tsui Hark has convinced himself that what one of his classic films really needed was an update with loads of CGI - witness Legend of Zu in 2001, an exercise which failed to convince anybody else of that viewpoint. This time he has an extra decade of Chinese experience in CGI to draw on though, and what's more... now he can do it in 3D! Well, I will have to take the internet's word for that, 'cause I watched in boring old 2D (albeit HD). Can he convince us this time that computer graphics are the tool he's been waiting for all along to truly unleash his imagination? No, he can't. Aside from a few impressive moments, the CGI still looks rather fake, and fails to impress or engage as well as the low-budget special effects (wires, clever camera work) that made the 1992 film such an impressive spectacle. Furthermore, he seems to have failed to note the main factor that caused Legend of Zu to rank so much lower in fans' hearts than its 1983 predecessor... all the special effects in the world won't engage an audience if they don't get involved in the story. Well-defined, likable (or hateable, where appropriate) characters whose fates we actually care about will encourage us to forgive any weaknesses in the special effects, but the converse is rarely true. Flying Swords of Dragon Gate fails to deliver on characters, and fails to develop the plot. The film begins by introducing the political intrigues of the court and the rival factions of the Eunuchs, then fails to provide any particular relevance to this detail. Jet Li plays a rebel who we assume to be patriotic, but doesn't actually offer any explanation whatsoever as to as his motivations, his particular plights, or much of a character at all (though he gets more than most). Various groups are introduced, and brought together at the inn, then the film sort of flounders for a little bit before everybody just sort of decides its time to start fighting. The sense of intrigue, the subtle details, the game of wits as these master fighters out-smart and out-guess each other... the actual meat of King Hu's original film, in other words... pretty much replaced by 'hey, one of the good guys happens to look exactly like the chief bad guy!'.

Oh well, Jet Li's on hand, so at least there must be some spectacular action, right? Oh yeah, I forgot... he got old. There are some nicely choreographed action scenes in places, but with too much reliance on CGI of mixed effectiveness.

Maybe I'm viewing the older films with a touch of rose-tinting, or maybe I'm just getting old and tHe KidZ will see the many virtues of the latest attempt to improve a classic that I'm missing. It probably did look quite spectacular in 3D-capable cinemas... but I am yet to be convinced that that can ever take the place of a well written script, or a director who still remembers that he has human actors on set somewhere, and that getting a great performance out of them is probably the most important of his job.