fludd.org - Movie Review

As you all know it, the 1990s was certainly not a very good period for Hong Kong, speaking about martial arts movies. In fact, like most movies that are supposedly kung-fu epic action flicks, The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk is unfortunately just a mindless kung-fu film among many others that looks like eons of nonsense during the movie’s entire running time. All in all, the previous statement on this Jet Li’s movie reveals you that you only watch The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk for the incredible fight scenes choreographed by director Corey Yuen (Kiss of the Dragon).

Movies in general are supposed to have a coherent script that dictates the narrative evolution of the storyline, but as strange as it might look, Corey Yuen’s bizarre movie The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk doesn’t seem to have any plot that drives the action and the motivation of the characters. As a result of a very fragile script that is used as a lame excuse by the movie director to make Jet Li and the other actors sweat in the fight scenes, The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk looks like a movie with sub-plots that goes nowhere for the three quarters of the film’s running time. During these moments that give you the feeling that you’re wasting your time, The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk annoyingly piles up a bunch of useless fight scenes or boring jokes.

Now, we don’t know what the movie really wants to show us, but Jet Li is certainly not made for comedy even though we evidently see that Li is striving to deliver a good performance during the humoristic part of this movie. Hopefully, like most movies made in Hong Kong, The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk just lasts for at least ninety minutes. As a result of that, we do get to see a movie that has a rather quick pace even though the three quarters of the movie’s running time, as it was said in the previous paragraph, looks like a total waste of time. The movie’s real story, in my opinion, really starts to activate itself near the end of the movie, which means that the movie tries to go in a specific narrative direction without losing itself, but that doesn’t save The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk from a disaster.

Unfortunately, while we do know why the characters are having their own motives, Corey Yuen’s pathetic movie often tends to fall into all kind of irksome clichés that we’ve probably seen in other kung-fu movie from Hong Kong such as Iron Monkey. Moreover, don’t take these as spoilers, but if your familiar with the kind of story that talks about corrupted government and revolutionary gangs that are seeking to overthrow the Chinese emperor, you can feel free to push the fast forward button on your DVD remote control. Obviously, don’t expect to see any characters’ psychological and emotive developments in the scenes that are near the end. While we can’t blame the actors for their performance that is way too melodramatic for no reason, we can certainly laugh at the very ridiculous characters.

Even though Jet Li (Hero) and the rest of the cast are quite good in the art of playing comedy, let it be said that their attempt to convince us in the supposedly dramatic scenes is just a complete failure. As someone who has probably not seen The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk, you probably have no idea how much it’s appalling to see one-dimensional characters interacting between each other. To be very honest with you, the actors, in general are not really convincing at all. That probably shows you that the producers in Hong Kong cared more about the actors’ physical prowess rather than their thespian abilities, because after all, The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk is targeting an audience that is looking forward to watch kung-fu fight scenes that don’t even contribute to give us a feeling that this movie has a plot. I know that it’s quite hard to read such a thing, but since the movie in general is a big mess from the beginning to the end, the fight scenes certainly come at the bad moment.

Finally, Jet Li might not beat Jackie Chan in terms of humour, but for once Jet Li does a movie that can be seen by a very large audience, because The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk is hopefully not as violent as it looks even though it is full to brim with eye-popping fight scenes that will pin you to your seat and make you ask for more of these scenes. To tell you the truth, there’s really nothing to understand with The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk: no story and no acting. That’s definitely a good way to describe this film. To sum up in a few words all the things that have been said in this movie review, just consider The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk as what it truly is: a piece of entertainment. Nothing more. Nothing Less.

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