An army led by General Wang Sheng (Chen Kun) comes across Xiaowei (Zhou Xun), a young woman who is being held by a group of bandits. After slaughtering the kidnappers, Wang takes Xiaowei into his home to protect her. When people in the surrounding town start being murdered and their hearts removed, Wang's wife (Vicki Zhao) starts to suspect Xiaowei is somehow involved. Meanwhile Pang Yong (Donnie Yen), the former leader of the army arrives back in town, drunk but content with his life as a wanderer with no obligations. He befriends a young woman (Betty Sun) who turns out to be from a family with a long history of hunting down demons and eradicating them. After witnessing a murder, the two set off to vanquish the demon.

Painted Skin isn't necessarily a bad movie, it just fails to capture your interest for more than 10 minutes at a time. Donnie Yen is by far the highlight of the movie, with acting that is quite funny and a charming character. Of course he is rarely matched in his action scenes. Unfortunately you can figure out what is going to happen almost immediately and you keep hoping that the scenes will be good enough to keep you interest throughout. The action scenes are a bit too wire-driven and heavily edited to the point that its quite hard to follow. Zhou Xun and Vicki Zhao are perfectly fine, but their characters have been played hundreds of times and they didn't bring much other than good looks to the table. Betty Sun's character is cute, but again it's material that has been done before. For the most part the movie just didn't feel like an exploration of anything new, but simply a rehash of ideas that we've all seen before.

6/10