When I bought the tickets to this movie, I have to admit that I was totally sold by the trailer and star power of the movie. In the trailer there were special effects aplenty and it seemed like an expensive production helmed by A listers. How much could it go wrong?Well, apparently, if you put the wrong directors in charge of the whole thing, the movie could become 300 meets Alice in Wonderland. There is plenty of flash and action, but half the time you are wondering which rabbit hole the plot went into, or whether the plot is fast disappearing like the Cheshire cat.
The Pang brothers aren't exactly bad directors. They managed to score a hit with The Eye, that Ring meets Shutter sleeper hit horror film that actually did quite well at the box office despite a relatively simple plot. However, in this film it was probably the first time they got a big budget and even bigger actors, and they proceeded to overdo everything without nailing the basics.
The plot was simple enough. Bad warlord tries to take over the kingdom, and heroes have to stop him. Then heroes try to find a guru to train them, which becomes an excuse to introduce a love interest for Wind, played by Charlene Choi, who was given an extended slo-mo sequence, supposedly to showcase her allure. Here's what a moviegoer near me in the cinema had to say about it.
"Wah lau eh, totally not chio can. Kanasai."
That's reality for you. So after training, our heroes set out to save the world, but apparently there is a complication. Wind was forced out of his training too early, and he is now a vigilante demon who knows not what he's killing. Cloud takes on the bad warlord, and appears to be totally whipping his ass till Wind shows up and messes everything. By some freak accident, the warlord actually gets killed, because it is time for Nicolas Tse to actually do something in the movie aside from posturing and looking like an effeminate and impotent bad guy.
After killing the warlord, Wind runs away with the national treasure, a dragon bone that represents the future of China. In the ensuing chase, Nicolas Tse, the soldiers and Cloud catch up, and a fight for the bone occurs. Now, this is one of the movie's biggest what the fuck moments. Nicolas Tse tries to steal the bone, it gets destroyed in a big fight, he runs, and the next thing you know Wind and Cloud are duelling it out somewhere. There is no mention about the fate of China, or of Nicolas Tse from this point.
Let me get this right. You have bad guys who are trying to steal a treasure, and heroes who are trying to stop him. One bad guy gets the treasure, but it gets destroyed, the bad guy runs away, and the good guys proceed to kill each other. Right. Then I would like to ask, what were the bad guys or the treasure for in the first place?
The only explanation I have for this is, for a moment the directors were trying to do Indiana Jones meets Tian Long Ba Bu, then suddenly they realised that their leads were not Harrison Ford and Qiao Feng. I'm sorry, I know this explanation is really far fetched, but I think if you watched the movie, you'd agree that the plot was worse.
It has been a long time since I watched a movie that left me absolutely mortified at how bad it was, and yet I sat through the whole thing just hoping that somehow, somewhere the movie would redeem itself. Then Cloud got himself killed. Fuck. The movie is called Wind Cloud and Cloud is dead. You know how central Wind and Cloud are to the original story? Here's an analogy. Is chicken rice the same thing without chicken or rice? All the special effects just felt like someone putting a lot of chilli over the whole thing. You could drown the whole plate of chicken rice in chilli, but without chicken or rice, just who the hell is going to eat that shit?
If I had $6.50 and I had to choose between watching this movie or using that cash as toilet paper, I would do the latter. Of course, that would present the problem of having to find something to do with the 50 cent coin, but yes, I would still choose that alternative.