Cinema Tuesdays Review

Omei Goodness, What's Going ON?
By Nathan Cone

There is an entire subculture of film geeks that loves all types of martial arts movies, and though I do not count myself among the fervent few, I do like a good Eastern action flick every now and then. "Zu Warriors" is full of action, but there is little else of substance that I could comprehend. The film was one of several martial arts fantasies that Miramax acquired following the success of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." As near as I can tell, it never opened in the United States, and is just now making its debut on DVD. Perhaps after editing an English-language version of the film, even former Miramax heads Harvey and Bob Weinstein couldn't tell what was going on in the film, because I sure could not either.

In "Zu Warriors," there exists a magical realm high above the clouds in China's Zu Mountain range. Several clans have lived there for hundreds of years, and now they are threatened by the mysterious devil Insomnia, which looks kind of like a horde of flying jellybeans that morphs into the shape of a fearsome skull. White Eyebrows (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo), the head of the Omei clan, retreats to meditate and come up with a plan to defeat Insomnia, while fellow clan head King Sky (Ekin Cheng), the mysterious Enigma (Cecilia Cheung), and an ambitious mortal (played by Zhang Ziyi) all do their best to fend off Insomnia -- insert your own joke here.

Their quest involves a lot of flying through the sky, attempts to combine two swords into one, and more flying. One character sprouts two wings made up of metal feathers that shoot the feathers like daggers at Insomnia, and another has a moon-shaped boomerang that he throws around a lot.

The first and only decent fight scene didn't occur until over an hour into the film, and of course, it involved Zhang Ziyi, so good in "House of Flying Daggers" and "Memoirs of a Geisha." She wields a mean sword.

"Zu Warriors" was directed by Tsui Hark, who also helmed the 1983 film "Zu Warriors," upon which this newer version is based. In an accompanying "Making of Zu Warriors" featurette on the DVD, Hark beams at how many special effects were used in the film. That's fine, but computer generated imagery is useless if it fails to advance or enhance the story, and in this case, it also fails to impress. The CGI overload in "Zu Warriors" succeeds in making the film look more like a video game rather than a fantastic foreign land.

Finally, I learned more about the plot of "Zu Warriors" from the trailer than the film itself. There's something to be said for letting a wild action movie simply wash over you, but with "Zu Warriors," I felt like I was drowning in a sea of incomprehensibility.

4/3/06

Back to the main Cinema Tuesdays Reviews page

More about the Cinema Tuesdays series