Review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016) by Jess M — 07 Aug 2017

I remember liking the first one. There was a certain beauty to its surrealism, and its story was simple and tragic.

Everything the first one did right, its sequel did wrong. My god, this was a terrible movie.

Both movies feature physics-bending, unrealistic combat, as you would expect, but there's a major difference in how it's integrated. The first only asked for suspension of disbelief at the outset, and then used its special action sequences as a device to tell a story. Instead, this sequel uses the "story" (and I'm being generous in calling it one) as a device to show off a series of ridiculous action sequences. If that weren't bad enough, this movie asks you to further suspend disbelief at every turn, and gives you no reason to feel invested in anything that happens in between these showy displays of jump cuts and impossible acrobatics.

This movie was so bad, I feel that even writing about it is wasting more of my life I could be spending doing literally anything else worthwhile. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.