Director: Luo Yiwei
Year: 2025
Country: China
Alternate Titles: Xiao ao jiang hu
Genre: Kung Fu/Martial Arts
Plot:
Living on a remote mountain, a fabled swordsman was ready to retire his sword when a chance encounter with a dangerous cult leader forced him back into action. As the evil Invincible East threatens the peaceful realm of Jianghu with her demon cult, he picks up his weapon and defends the land with a ragtag crew of misfit warriors in this mystical wuxia throwback.
Review:
Overall, this was a fairly fun, straightforward martial arts effort. The main selling point here is the overreliance on the fanciful, over-the-top kung fu displays that are built to focus on the wire-fu and wuxia dynamics. The over-the-top nature of the fighting scenes here, demonstrated with people flying across the screen, manipulating their surroundings into their opponent, or conjuring objects to do something against their creation during battle, gives this a flurry of high-energy, overloaded action scenes with the characters in combat. With the grounded hand-to-hand or weaponry utilized as well during these scenes, the variety involved in these scenes helps even more to offer up exhilarating sequences, which all create a slew of fantastic encounters throughout here in a variety of places. The fact that there’s also as much in the film keeps this moving along just fine, with the pacing kept quite high with the longer running time.
The story here, from the struggle to keep the competing members of the different societies working against each other, who are trying to keep their secrets safe from the other, is fine for what it is, but it does have some issues. There’s a fine setup overall with the one clan trying to protect the secrets of the deadlier martial arts moves from getting into the wrong hands and the other group doing what they can to use the secret teachings to enhance their powers, as this provides a fine way to generate the conflict necessary in these kinds of stories to move the battle forward and interact with each other. It’s just so beat-for-beat based on the original that it never has any surprise at all, and feels so tied to these points that the story does feel generic at times. Rather than try to impart something special about the whole experience and bring the swordsman into the fight, it ends up exactly like it’s expected, so that might make for an exhaustive watch, all being what holds this one back.
Overview: ****/5
A strong and stylish martial arts effort, this one comes together rather nicely for what it is, while only having a few minor drawbacks present to keep it from what it could’ve been. Those with an appreciation for this brand of kung-fu effort or don’t mind the issues on display will have a lot to like here, while most others might want to heed caution.
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