This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Perfect cast and a good story

One of the best films i have seen

This wonderful adventure comedy is filled with eye-popping action and big budget sets and other top line production values, but what really makes the movie is the fact that the main story is framed within another even funnier story. You see, Dr. Wai, China's answer to Indiana Jones, is a fictional creation of author Jet Li, who has writer's block and is facing a deadline. So, his two idiot assistants and soon-to-be-ex-wife 'help' him by writing in parts of the story while he sleeps, causing the main story line of 'Dr. Wai' to go off in wild directions, and causing characters to shift from good to bad and back again. As a straight adventure movie, this is fine entertainment, but as a comedy about the creative process it is very clever and quite effective. Each of the four writers has his/her own slant and makes the story different by their contributions, and yet it all comes together smoothly. Plus, the mix of comedy, romance, historical fiction and martial arts action meshes well, something that is not often the case in Hong Kong pictures.HIGHLY recommended for anybody who likes Jet Li, action movies in general, or even movies about writers. This one is smart, well-formed entertainment.

Woah, what a brilliant movie. This movie was the movie that made me want to get cable TV because world movies was advertising it, and it caught my attention immediately. I didn't end up getting cable because not only did I find this movie at my not-so-local video store, but I discovered that it had yellow subtitles - which are far better than the white ones that are found on most Chinatown videos.Now, I at first thought that this movie was a simply Indiana Jones adventure movie, which was one of the reasons that I wanted to hire it. There was a lot of similarities between this movie and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the thing is that this movie was a thousand times better - Harrison Ford was never that great a martial artist.The difference with this movie is that it jumps between the 1930's and the present day. Dr Wai is actually a script being written by a company and the writer is in the middle of divorce and has lost all will to right, so his assistants take the job of writing it for him, but when he sees it going a way he doesn't like, he takes over and moves it to a more acceptable place, then others come along and add their own bits to the story.The writer of the story is a geek (though Jet Li doesn't come across as a geek) and so are his co-writers. Every character in the present era have duplicates in the story, though this duplicity becomes less substantial as the characters being to take on their real names and real roles. Dr Wai is about dreams and how we place ourselves into our own dreams, a dream of what we want to be is true. Here the geek, who could not hurt anybody, is a rough, tough, adventurer king who is a whizz at martial arts. His wife, Monica, is a bitch queen who controls the Japanese soldiers in China. Yet when others take over, their perception of Monica take over, and so does their perception of Dr Wai. The scene where he drives a steam train through the town is a classic scene of where another aspect of Dr Wai emerges.The movie itself seems predictable, but we don't watch Hong Kong movies for their unpredictability (actually we do, because there are a lot of unpredictable aspects to their movies) but we watch them for their action, and Dr Wai delivers. It has every thing from ramming a steam train through numerous buildings, jumping out of a burning aeroplane, fighting a monster who is in fact the bad guy who was mutated, and ancient artifacts that are needed to be retrieved. This movie has it and this movie seriously rocks.

Thomas Weissman, who wrote a supposedly major text on Asian cinema (which unfortunately probably blocked publication of better texts for some time) pee-ed off a lot of fans of Hong Kong cinema. One of the reasons is that he knows dam' well the difference between a good movie and a good "genre" film, but, instead of developing this difference critically, he prefers to smudge it, and thus frequently leaves readers with misconceptions.Weissman's review of this film promised a real avant-garde transgression of time and space, of pulp and serious narrative. I'm afraid that's not what's happening here.For one thing, we get no closer to any of this characters than we do in any other Hong Kong genre film. That's important; to make real transgressions of time, space, genre, etc., we need to see what's going on from a particular point of view. (If one doesn't care for "The Singing Detective" - and I don't - then refer to "Slaughterhouse Five".) Since this is really an "action-comedy". it can't do that. Instead, it scrambles its plot around from several different points of view; but the heart of the narrative remains action, not 'perspective'.Well, is it a good action comedy? yeah, I enjoyed it, I'll probably watch it again. IS it the super-duper-transgressive New-wave make or break film that Weissman and a few others have touted it as? Nope. For that see Wong Kar Wai's "Ashes of Time".But not every film has to be really really serious or 'great'. This is a fun film, with some weird displacements of time and space, just to make it interesting. Enjoy it as such.

If you're not already a hardcore - and I do mean ultra-hardcore must see everything the man has done - Jet Li fan, AVOID THIS MOVIE AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT. I and one of my best friends are avid HK movie fanatics, and very big on Li. At best, we drank beer and tried hard not to laugh at the ultra-bad story and lame acting and poor action. The plot device of a modern-day Jet Li and his cohorts expressing their emotions about what is going on in their lives thru a continuing written story of a 'King of Adventurers' is absolutely terrible and distracting. And I LIKE stories told thru flashback and scene jumping, a la Man Called Hero. Though I'm sure someone will claim this device is 'inventive', it is incredibly annoying and very poorly delivered. And don't even get me started on the scene with the puppet mutant mouse - yes, you unfortunately read that right, a giant puppet mutant mouse.For hardcore Li fans the only thing of interest is seeing Li play a totally different type of character - out of touch, a semi-loser, not sure what's going on and dumped on by his love interest. And that held my attention - for all of five minutes. Then I had to have more beer. And it still didn't help. Do yourself a favor and skip over the VCD in your local Chinatown and grab New Legend of Shaolin or Hitman if you're in the mood for Li, or Tokyo Raiders or Double Tap for good modern HK cinema. Buy this thing only if you're really drunk or really daring, or you need a new coaster for your drink. And if you do buy it, don't call me.