Childhood friends Dragon (Donnie Yen) and Tiger (Nicholas Tse) reunite as adults on different sides of the Dragon Tiger Gate, a place where youngsters are taught to become heroes. While Tiger has become an upstanding citizen, Dragon has become the top muscle for the criminal Lousha gang and its masked head, Shibumi. The two friends come together with the help of nunchaku-wielding friend Turbo (Shawn Yu) when the master of Dragon Tiger Gate (Yuen Wah) is killed by Shibumi.

Reuniting director Yip and Donnie Yen from the previous year’s superior action film SPL, and chucking a sizable budget at the screen, the hopes were high for DRAGON TIGER GATE.

It starts with a bang, and delivers high energy action from choreographer Yen – who incidentally seems to have found a time machine somewhere along his travels as he appears to be getting younger as the years go by. While the action is along the more fantastic wire-fu variety, it is delivered in an exciting way and almost never ceases to be enjoyable. The inclusion of Turbo and his ever-present nunchaku grounds the film in some kind of reality when he’s present (barring some special effects shots) and the mixture works well.

However, the narrative isn’t so good. I suspect a lot of this is down to being based on a comic strip – there are far too many characters and back-stories thrown in that it quickly becomes frustrating. I imagine fans of the comic strip will appreciate the detail and thoroughness of DRAGON TIGER GATE’s weaving storylines, but personally I thought the film could have lost a few characters and not been any the worse for it. Again, this is probably obvious for fans of the source material, but I found the partly modern urban and partly dark fantasy settings a bit strange. It’s always going to be hard to fit a well-established literary serial into a 94-minute movie, but I just wished they’d have simplified it a bit for newbies.

It’s always nice to see Yuen Wah in an action role (albeit rather digitally enhanced) and he has a good, meaty role as Master Wong. Other than him and the leads, though, the rest is all pretty forgettable, except for a scene with a fully dressed Li Xiao-Ran taking a dip in a swimming pool. Even third lead Turbo is somewhat a mystery and even though I love nunchaku scenes I thought his character was surplus to requirements.

With so many people praising Hong Kong’s action sequences in an age where they are no longer as accomplished as they used to be and ignoring their much improved ability to tell a good story, it’s always a shocker to see something directly to the contrary. And that’s what DRAGON TIGER GATE is for me – a lot of good action scenes with some less inspired dialogue and uninteresting characters in between.