Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)
Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia • 龍門飛甲 (2011)

Genre: Wuxia
Director: Tsui Hark
Starring: Jet Li, Zhou Xun, Chen Kun, Li Yuchun, Kwai Lun-mei, Louis Fan, Mavis Fan
Language: Mandarin
Duration: 125 min.
Rating: 6.1  

Summary:
Several groups of warriors head to the Dragon Inn in the middle of the Gobi Desert in search for a legendary lost city and battle each other for the chance to claim the great treasure the city holds.



Flying Swords of Dragon Gate is a film directed by Tsui Hark. A remake of the 1992 film he produced titled New Dragon Gate Inn, which was itself a remake of the 1966 film Dragon Gate Inn. It screened out of competition at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. It received five awards at the 31st Hong Kong Film Awards.

Reunited with international star Jet Li for the first time since 1993, Tsui Hark delivers a blockbuster re-imagining of a popular wuxia classic. It's an ambitious production that expands on the number of heroic characters involved and updates the action with the latest cinematic technology, but suffers from a convoluted story, distracting melodramatic subplots, and an over reliance on unconvincing CGI effects and exaggerated 3D gimmickry.  

Also Jet Li is rather poorly used, going inexplicably missing for a large proportion of the running time, including the film's best dramatic set-piece. A tense powder-keg of a sequence where several groups of opposing factions converge on a remote inn located in the middle of the Gobi Desert. A rough and tumble roadhouse frequented by eccentric characters that feels somewhat like a cross between the Mos Eisley Cantina and Tarantino's La Louisiane. While the various sides scheme and plot against each other, the storm of the century ominously looms outside, threatening to erase the entire place from existence. However the lack of Li's presence in this otherwise brilliant section makes his top billing feel like a disappointing bait-and-switch.

The biggest problem I had was with the incredibly fake looking effects. I know you don't watch this type of movie looking for realism or a coherent story, but when all the action sequences keep repeating the same cheap trick: flying swords, flying arrows, flying daggers, flying logs, flying broken shards of steel, and whatever other flying projectiles the special effects team could contrive. After awhile it gets tiresome, it starts to feel like watching a bunch of random demos from a video game. No matter how visually spectacular and painstakingly choreographed the digitally enhanced fighting may be, they just lack the intangible spirit and marvel of real stuntmen performing real stunts, and it makes you long for the days when it used to be wires and athleticism.

Bonjour Tristesse

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate • Long men fei jia (2011)

13 comments:

FrontRoomCinema said...

Not really my cup of tea, but looks stunning!

Hoi-Ming Ng said...

Real stuntwork.. Man I miss those days. That's why I'll always respect Jackie.

DEZMOND said...

I still love me some Asian films, for visual pleasure off course. I don't really get their culture based on fighting methods and I don't get their acting, but I always deeply enjoy their visuals. THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER is still my fave. 

d_4 said...

Yeah, no real story and repeated flying things. I used to enjoy it all, but I could definitely see myself getting bored of it here.

Lisa Thatcher said...

Your images here are gorgeous!  Wonderful review as usual.
I really agree with you about that stunt man thing. I got the Terminator series out of DVD to watch with my son because he only knows Arnie as the Govenator, and as we were watching he was gripped and said "Mum, they're really doing it!  This is real. Its really happening!"  and then I realised he'd almost never seen films with stunt men performing stunts.  My son, at home in the world of video games and disaster films, fell instantly in love with all those old films because they look so real.

The Reel Foto said...

jet li? hmmm....why not?

Bonjour Tristesse said...

As it turns out it wasn't really mine either.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Yeah huge respect to him. Maybe one day computers will accurately and convincingly reproduce human movement, but we haven't quite advanced that far yet.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

I prefer HERO, but yeah Zhang Yimou sure creates some beautiful visuals.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Same here. I've lost my tolerance for it. This is pretty close to what a Michael Bay film would look like if he was Chinese.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Haha that is awesome!  Even though they often look just as fake. I will always choose real stunts, prosthetics, and stop motion miniatures over CGI any day.

Jason said...

I grew up watching some of Tsui Hark's work so it's nice to see him still cranking out pictures but the 92 version of the story, New Dragon Gate Inn, has a magnificent cast that can't be beaten: Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Yeah that cast is awesome. But I need to see that version again. It's been so long, I honestly don't remember much about it at all.

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