There's a village about to be raized by some marauding army hired by the new imperial dynasty to rid the land of potential enemies. A band of 7 people with super swords join forces to save the people.

The movie was... not horrible, but pretty bad. The first 30 minutes are VERY confusing, the last 20 minute fight scene finale is not so great (embarrassingly bad in some places), and over all the film suffers from being horribly edited. There's just random jumping around and confusing scenes that leave you hanging until that thread is picked up 15 minutes later. (and not in the good way).


And then there is Joy Luck... Joy Luck and all the other random stuff that is inserted in there with no meaningful reason (stuff like Michael Wong's 3 seconds of screen time). This stuff just left you wondering "huh? why is this in here, what were they thinking? why is this important enough to waste 5 minutes of film on?!?" Its clear that they had to cut a lot out to fit it into a theater release, but the decisions on what to cut and what to keep seems so poorly made

(To anyone who says this movie is not seriously flawed, i point to 'Joy Luck the horse' - case closed, no justification for that AT ALL)

In order to not waste too much time on this, and avoid spoilers for those who still want to watch it, I won't go into any specific details... other than to say 'when the Joy Luck (Lai Fu) the Horse scenes come up, this is a good time to make your bathroom break.

Around the middle, after the initial confusion is over, the plot gets a little more interesting and there is actally SOME character development (i mean at least i could finally tell who was who). But in the end, the only thing i really found that made this movie worth it was the Korean girl played by Kim So Yun. although her character was also poorly written, it was at least unique enough to catch my interest and keep it (that and she is very beautiful!) Unfortunately she plays opposite of Donnie Yen in most of the film. I have trouble divorcing his characters in movies from the general cockeyness that comes across from him in interviews, etc. So I didn't particularly enjoy much of him i this movie. Leon Lai, although supremely bland, was at least less distasteful to me. :-P

Actionwise, for the most part not too bad. Some /really/ bad wire-fu in a few scenes... I got serious flashbacks to Wong Fei Hong... but its not 1993 anymore, we expect more!

I should also mention that in the theater in Kowloon I saw it in, people were laughing outloud in the last 5 minutes or so. so if you watch it on DVD and get the urge, go for it. ;-)

Cinematographywise, its pretty good, the sets looked good (apparently filmed mostly in Xinjiang).

But it seemed like it was trying hard to keep up with Hero and even possibly Lord of the Rings... but I guess unoriginality and Tsui Hark are not strangers...

this one will get a 4/10 i think....

if you go in with low expectations, and perhaps a little bit of research in advance on who is who, you will not be too disappointed. if you're expecting greatness... go see something else.