Dragon Inn (1992)
Reviewed by: nomoretitanic on 2001-04-21
Summary: So Short
I usually like movies that take place within a short period of time: those Die Hard movies, Do the Right Thing, Magnolia, Bring Out the Dead, Pulp Fiction...etc. I don't recall seeing as many Chinese movies in the same forms, well I guess Dragon Inn is one of them. IT takes place over two days in this shady inn and tension builds and explodes then explodes again and again.

Some stories really shouldn't be told in a short period. This is one of them. The movie really seems like a climax with little build up. The background story is told through an execution sequence in the beginning where the executed good guy accuses the evil eunuchs of doing evil things, to, more or less, the audience. So we'd know why they're so evil. The characters are very underdeveloped. Some good chemistry but you can only go so far with that. The fight scenes are good solid wuxia, flying stuff, but they're way too short. They serve little purposes, since we only hate the villains because the movie tells us to, but nothing against them otherwise. The good guys belong to that cowboy genre where there are a lot of mysteries and past stories that remain untold, well that's a stupid (or lazy) decision because I ended up not caring for them very much. Those two lil' kids were awful actors.

The ending is pretty typical I guess, no twist nor nothing, just some bad special effects. That's the prob I have with all Hark Tsui movies, always so ambitious and always fall short.