Review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016) by Ryan V — 19 Apr 2016

I decided to watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Sword of Destiny and I am severely disappointed. The original movie directed by Ang Lee was a masterpiece. The fight choreography, the music, and the cinematography. The sequel has a few of these elements, mainly the cinematography.

The thing that struck me first was the fact that the movie is in English. It just seems wrong to see both Donnie Yen and Michelle Yeoh speaking English in a movie when the original was in Chinese.

Second, the fight choreography. When you have people such as Michelle and Donnie Yen you expect a level of sophistication. Instead we are treated to slow action and the overuse of the transition slow-motion shots. Gone are the fight choreographers that did such spectacles like IP Man, The Matrix, and numerous Jackie Chan films. The movie has a feeling of quantity of quality during the fight scenes. Think back to IP Man, the three main fights. Ip versus the foreigner, Ip versus 10 japanese men, and Ip versus the General. With the exception of the 10 versus Ip they concentrate on just two combatants. Just like in the original Crouching Tiger. It allows us to get a feel for the style each character has, not just some quirk that you will see in a large battle.

Woo-Ping Yuen, the director did a good job. But having seen the previous film he directed, True Legend, it left me wanting for so much more. To this day I have only watched True Legend once but when I want to watch something cool I will return to it to watch the amazing fight scenes. I can only hope he will return to making films like that, even if they don't have the marketability that Netflix provided.

The movie also falls victim to the Star Trek (2009) villain problem. The villain shows up and then disappears for most of the movie. He doesn't feel like a threat. Instead he just sends out people to do his bidding. In addition, it tries to follow too many plot lines. Something that many felt happened with the 2000 film too (read: the desert love plot line).

So, like many others have said before me; not a great film. But, I applaud Netflix for trying to do what they did and it is unfortunate that they were met with such opposition when trying to release the film in theaters.