Movie Review: Flying Swords of Dragon Gate/龍門飛甲

This was the second-to-last film I saw in 2011. I saw it with the Gang of Film at Olympian City cinema.

This film is a (insert annoying Hollywood verb here) of King Hu’s 1967  Dragon Inn as well as Raymond Lee’s 1992  New Dragon Inn. 

Jet Li appears in what must now be his third or fourth ‘last’ martial arts film.

“No, don’t announceOnce More Upon a Time in China yet!”

But hey, he’s Jet Li. 

And if that’s not enough, he’s not Jackie Chan, so there you go.

Drunken Bastard is more like it.

Jet Li plays Zhao Huai’an, the leader of a group of outlaws who have declared war on the grossly corrupted East and West Bureaus, run by the nastiest bunch of eunuchs you ever saw.

Why are eunuchs always portrayed as cruel, bitchy savages? I’d be mad too if I got my junk cut off, but I also would be testosterone deprived and therefore less aggressive biologically.

It doesn’t matter.  Eunuchs are bad people. Pale too. Literally white.

Ahhhh, now I see why they’re bad people.

It’s always good to see Gordon Liu on the big screen, and he does not disappoint here.

Finally, a Mortal Kombat release worth buying!

Though he may have been disappointed at having to play a eunuch (wouldn’t you?), Liu does it with zeal, and it is fun to watch.

He is taken out by Zhao Huai’an in the film’s opening battle. This enrages the Head Eunuch In Charge of the East Bureau, played by Aloys Chen.

Though let’s face it, an enraged eunuch is not very, uh, ragey.

Adding to the confusion (?) is the fact that there appears to be not one but two outlaws named Zhao Huai’an, the second being, in fact, a woman played by Zhou Xun.

  It took me two weeks to write this review because I wouldn’t stop staring at this photo.

Digression: we saw the Cantonese dub of the film, and therefore I didn’t get to hear her real voice, which is deep and scratchy and magnificent. Though her dubbed Cantonese voice was also deep and scratchy, it wasn’t quite the same.

I don’t know who this man is. But I’m going to kill him just the same. 

I don’t want to talk too much about the plot since either you already know it from the earlier films, or you should go see it yourself.

Because you should.

There’s intrigue, humor, wit, and lots of gender-bending in terms of the literal (eunuchs, women pretending to be men) as well as people who gleefully (and entertainingly) violate gender expectations.

Guey Lun Mei plays a Tartar bandit with a tattooed face and a dating style that can only be described as predatory.

When she says use it or lose it, she means it. 

Aloys Chen plays two roles in the film; the aforementioned eunuch -

多德看起來像個淑女.

and another character named Wind Blade who is hardly a paragon of manliness his damn self:

“這是這麼久… 硬…”

Li Yuchun plays a bandit leader who can steal my tomboy-loving heart any time she wants.

One steaming hot bowl of Young Tom Girl coming right up.

It’s Tsui’s first film in 3-D, and I will say that it works well (though not having it 3-D on DVD wouldn’t really cost you anything either). It’s unobtrusive, in the sense that I didn’t find myself saying “Ahhh, here’s the 3D portion,’ as I did in  True Legend.

The other nice thing I can say about the 3-D is that it didn’t give me a headache, which happens with a lot of 3-D films, no matter their country of origin.

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate/龍門飛甲 also relies heavily on CGI, which overall managed to look pretty good. The opening sequence of the film is a birds-eye-view shot of a harbor, with the bird/camera flying over the ships and even between the rigging lines and masts. It was CGI, and you can tell, but its still pretty good. And in situations like this, I never blame the filmmakers, because you can’t afford to build a real set like that; the scale is simply too large.

The CGI was good enough that a man to my right asked his wife “Where did they film this?”, which I and another Gang member found very amusing.

Maybe I was distracted by the very watchable female leads. 

Maybe I am nostalgic.

Maybe my standards have been kicked, beaten, and spit upon by the other films of 2011.

Maybe I just needed to like a film before that cinematically wretched year expired.

Or maybe Flying Swords of Dragon Gate/龍門飛甲  really is a very good film. It’s not Tsui Hark’s greatest, but it is certainly light years ahead of Missing and All About Women. And it kicks the living dogsh*t out of the rest of the Class of 2011.

It is, in many ways, a stylistic return to form for Tsui Hark, much like last year’s Detective Dee.

Like his best films, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate/龍門飛甲 gives us visually impressive  entertainment, and if at times the plausibility (and CGI) are strained past their breaking point, it is still a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

And that, dear reader, is really all I ever ask.

Well,almost all.