Simply A Masterpiece

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Plot Summary:Donnie Yen is living in a small village working for a paper mill. One day two notorious thieves show up to rob the place, and Donnie Yen ends up killing them. This prompts an investigation led by Kaneshiro, a detective whom doesn't emphasize with humanity and suppresses his feelings through acupuncture.After days of digging Kaneshiro dicovers Donnie Yen is from a family of assassins called 72 Dragons, and is wanted for the murder of a butcher's family. Donnie en has been in hiding for 10 years and has settled down with married life. But after rumors spread of his resurgance, the 72 Dragons want their son back.Because the Detective put both his family and the village in danger, he decides to help Donnie Yen capture the Dragons. They have a final showdown inside his village home when they both succeed in taking down the Dragon Leader, Papa Dragon. ---------------------------- Film pays homage to History of Violence, and The One-Armed Swordsman

The name of the film doesn't exactly help in explaining what this is about. Basically what we have here is a film that very much is derivative of "A History of Violence", a North American movie which was quite popular for anyone who may not have heard of it before.What we have is Donnie Yen as our lead who is found out to not be the weak feeble countryman but is hiding a dark secret that may lead to danger for all those he loves. Takeshi Kaneshiro stars as the moral minded detective who opens up a pandora's box with his investigations into Donnie Yen's character.Now this is a film that combines the beauty of big scale Chinese movies with some sublime martial arts choreography, wonderful to watch. Ridiculously good fun but sadly the movie does seem to fail in the last quarter or so, I just guess they didn't know how what to do after all the twists and turns earlier on in the film.It's worth a viewing if you enjoy martial arts, but I feel it will appeal to many others too for the direction, settings, acting and suspense. It's a fine film but could have been much more. Enjoyable enough.

I was intrigued by the original title, _Wuxia_, because some of the wuxia light novels. This movie turns out to be anything, but what I was expecting. I was expecting an action packed, fighting movie, because of Donnie Yen, but there was like only two decent fighting scenes. The movie turned out to be more of a crime, and mystery movie, like a Chinese Sherlock Holmes. It might be might fault, because this is what I think when I see Wuxia: The word "wuxia" is a compound composed of the elements wu (lit. "martial", "military", or "armed") and xia (lit. "honourable", "chivalrous", or "hero").What made dislike the movie the most, is the incident with the main villain at the end. I was screaming at the screen, 'are you serious?'

Wuxia(pronounced woo-shee-ah)is a genre label of Chinese fiction about the trials and tribulation of martial artists in ancient China. Often Loners, they serve no master, and may hide behind a notorious past which must come to a head at one point so as to realign the universal elements within.Think along the thematic of Eastwood's spaghetti western but far more sublime than that.This is a remarkable cinematic journey - so far, one i took four times with each sitting revealing a deeper message about our own inner struggle with our duality of light and darknessDonnie Yen is a wonderful and very subtle actor. He's got acting chops and even without the choreographed martial arts, he's a delight to watch. Once of his best performance. In this movie, he's the karmic WuxiaTakeshi Kaneshiro, another fine Asian actor, plays the perfect foil, a prefecture detective of the scientific and logical mind caught between his own self righteousness and his admittance that there is no such thing as good men. He's the catalyst to the storm ahead. I've read most of the reviews posted and they are all excellent.All i can add to them is the finale, a brutal battle royal between the head "demon" of the clan and his offspring no longer under his spell, is simply epic and unforgettable and will surely have your heart pounding on an adrenaline high till the denouement. One of the few movies IMHO that deserve a 10