The decline of Hong Kong's once distinct brand of shoe string budget filmmaking could be (and by some has been) tied to this hotly anticipated wuxia epic based on the popular comic book series Wind Cloud.

An inadvertent but nonetheless biting allegory for post-handover Hong Kong cinema Andrew Lau's "The Storm Riders" is a film divided by contradictions: The bubble gum cast is peppered with cameos from solid, established, reliable actors. The episodic nature of Manfred Wong's script despite a healthy two plus hour runtime is a thoroughly unelaborated upon odyssey that might have lived up to its potential as a 10 part TV mini series though once the film sets in this mess is hard to give up on. Comfort Chan's score which sounds as if it was lifted from a popular video game is a downright insult a la the underwhelming aesthetic quality of the overwrought CGI. Director Andrew Lau, who pulls double duty as the film's cinematographer, makes the most of China's natural beauty.

"The Storm Riders: The International Version" is dubbed in English and exorcises nearly 40 minutes of footage rendering an already incomplete film officially unintelligible.