The over ambitious, state-of-the-art special effects spectacular sequel to Tsui Hark’s ‘Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain’. This movie not only contains probably the most number of special effects every witnessed in any HK Movie but has a collection of Mega Stars, which results in the movie bursting with artistic eye-candy.

Ekin Cheng and Cecilia Cheung are substituted for Adam Cheng and Brigitte Lin, from the older version, to face off in a new conflict with new challenges. The basic plot is, King Sky (Ekin) the last remaining member of the Kun Lun Clan, lost his true love / senior martial art tutor Dawn (Cecilia) over two hundred years by the hands of the Evil Insomnia, a powerful force eager on destroying all of humanity and anything else that stands in it’s way. Now Insomnia has set its sites on Zu Mountain and every inhabitant that lives there is in trouble. O-Mei Clan, led by White Brows (Sammo Hung again!! as in the earlier version), possess the Thunder and Heaven Swords, which when combined together form a powerful weapon that has the ability to destroy insomnia once and for all.

White Brow conjures up a plan to reincarnate Hollow into an inexperienced martial artist (Wu Jing, whom appears in earlier work in ‘Tai Chi 2’), with hardly any knowledge of the martial arts world. With the help of the Heaven Sword Keep Enigma (Cecilia Cheung) he will regain his lost memory and once again know how to use Thunder Sword with its full potential. King Sky falls in love with Enigma (whom is obviously the spitting image of his long lost tutor), and white brows also seeks his help since King Sky is the only one that possesses the power of reincarnation.

This movie not only has great special effects, but the whole storyline and great selection of cast make this tale transpiring and almost invigorating. Louis Koo stars as O-Mei’s Top disciple ‘Red’ guarding the blood cave, where the dreadful Insomnia resides. We also have other appearances from Patrick Tam, Zhang Ziyi and Lau Shun (whom you might recognize as Wong Fei Hung’s Father in ‘Once upon a Time in China 3, 4 and 5’) all playing a small but very important role in the movie, in the destruction of Insomnia. Relying on just the storyline, Tsui Hark placed the ‘Legend of Zu’ on a unbalanced scale, focusing more on the Special Effects and CGI and less on character development, which fractures the cinematic equilibrium of the movie, resulting in more eye-candy and less references on character background. This is not to say ‘Legend of Zu’ is not such a great movie, it has a good line of well established cast with very little overacting or bad acting for that matter. Unfortunately Zhang Ziyi can’t help but play the young rebel martial arts student, once again wanting to exceed everyone, but obviously fails miserably, since there are too many good actors in this movie for her to ruin it and well she comes in about 10 – 15 minutes of the movie, thank-god!!

The only real complaint about this movie would be that Tsui Hark, tried to cram too much storyline into this movie, and hence the plot was completely lost. Having Yuen Woo Ping to action-choreograph this movie was a bonus and raised the bar of expectations quite a bit. Although the martial arts, was the core for this picture. The fight scenes are few and short and CGI used only displayed the characters powers and usage of weapons.

Overall a well made movie with some evident flaws and the final result being somewhat disappointing. Better luck next time, Tsui Hark!!!

Overall Rating: 7.9/10