Near Death Experience for Jackie

I’ll start this one with a quote from Markgway from one highly respected forum in Internet – “Remember when Jackie Chan movies used to be in Cantonese?” (All copyrights goes to Markgway). After this obvious attempt for copyright theft I’ll try to share my thoughts over one quite old and significant movie from Jackie’s filmography. Old, because it was made in 1986 and significant as this was a near death experience for poor, battered body of Jackie Chan. 

Quick Punch: ancient beauty contest

Another day, another movie, another review, which I wanted to be at least better than the previous entry, but alas – again I found underwater rock and my positive emotions sunk like Titanic, with even more casualties. The movie itself is produced by the legendary Jackie Chan, however here his name is not even enough to generate the needed impact on my martial arts movies feelings, due to numerous factors, which I’m going to explain further down. It’s epic in scale, grand in patriotic feel, and with the same weight it crashes flat on its back and cries lonely on the bottom of the vault for useless movies.

Quick punch: flesh and bullets...

A long time ago I saw a movie involving chicks with guns, and all I remember was the odd looking shattering glass all over the place. It wasn’t so bad as a martial arts movie or as action wise, however it was nothing above average. Nice stunts, good choreography and some fine looking women – Shu Qi, Karen Mok & Wei Zhao. Corey Yen was there as a director and I strongly suspect that he was involved in the martial arts department too. Why am I explaining this to you, and what relation has with the title reviewed here – all is revealed further down. 

The Four - a mixture of something...

Significant portions of my days now are being taken by sleeping, eating and watching movies, however due to the fact that I'm a father of a 4 years old daughter, these movies are far from the martial arts universe (well, except Ninja in the Dragon's den, Kung Fu Hustle & Drunken Master), therefore I wasn't much present here to write something really inspiring. But after watching the last movie I thought to break my stiffness and deliver another review in style. Now I'm boasting myself, but that's only temporary event. So how come the title suggest one thing and in reality is happened to be another? Answers follow up - please feel free to read.

B-movie? Nah, it's more like F+ to me...

In history of martial arts movies many titles were close to the definition "bad", but only few made it into Hall of Fame, being the cream of the top in worse to awuful filmmaking. Unfortunately such underwater mines can't be detected by simply watching the trailer, so you just have to sit and "enjoy" the full length of medieval acting, combined with lousy production values, ugly actors, plot as simple as drawing a line and last but not least - unique blend of idiotic martial arts choreography only surpassed by the idiotic dialog.
This is something tough to achieve, even in the martial arts department, however the movie reviewed here managed to complete all of the above 100%. A rare gem indeed.