I have never liked Jacky Chan's acting or usual silly tricks BUT this film directed by Stanley Tong is exceptional. His movies have been the best of HK action movies since the 90's.
Compared to the recent messy Seven Swords, this movie is much much better.
This movie was a mess too. It tried to be too much and ended up being too little. And talk about corny/cheesy.
This is one of Stanley Tong's worst. The visual effects were amatuerish. His over use of black fades was just annoying and he just can't do drama very well.
His action sequences are pretty amazing though.
the action sequences are quite good, the "previous life" parts were quite well done. however, like the chinese saying "shen long jian shou bu jian wei" (one can see the head but not the tail of the dragon), the ending is crap, like all other Jacky Chan movies. The "current life" dialogue is about as dictated as in "Who am I?". There's unwrapped ends everywhere and none of the characters were given any back story.
The story has quite some semblance towards the 1989 Ching Siu Tung film "Qin Yong".
it could've been done a lot better if Jacky spend some of that wad of money in hiring WETA to do their CGI, it's horrendously 80's.
--anti-dubber.
Hahaha... Stanley is good!? I really like to try the thing you've been smoking...
Mr. Magoo anyone? Remember that movie!? Crap!
Action part is good!? Yeah sure, the horse that kick the hell out of the enemy soldier... had to laugh on that! What a bad CGI! And thought!
"Action part is good!? "
suggestion: read what you write...
the horse kick is one example of cheap fx, siungsen. the action sequences i'm talking about are for example, the chase in india with the sword, the battle sequences between the deserters and supporters, ...
--anti-dubber.
Stanley Tong is horrible.
I am a big fan of Jackie Chan, even before he became famous all around the world with Rush Hour.
Still, he made a good share of bad movies.
The ones directed by Stanley Tong aren't really among their best. He's good at directing good action scenes WITHOUT CGI and that's pretty much all he can do. He can't keep a plot coherent, he can't direct drama, he can't do anything else properly.
Oh yeah, and MR.MAGOO, ARGH!
-- SPOILER --
Though in this movie (The Myth), I liked the scene where the gerenal's head is chopped off, and we see it from his point of view. Completely unrealistic, but very inspired IMO.
-- END OF SPOILER --