wAntAn productions

It's been a long time since I've caught a kung-fu movie in the cinemas (the Matrix movies do not count!). Well today I watched the House of Flying Daggers. From the same director who brought us Hero, Zhang Yi Mou. House of Flying Daggers stars Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau and Zhang Zi Yi. Zhang Zi Yi has been in every major kung-fu movie targeted at international audiences including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero and the movie on today's topic.
The movie has been out for only slightly over a week in Malaysian cinemas and surprisingly the cinema I was in was only half full! This after all, is the movie that is carries the claim #1 movie in all it's newspaper advertisements. False advertising aside the movie was surprisingly good.
House of Flying Daggers is shot entirely in Mandarin so bananas like myself would probably have a hard time understanding the dialogue. Luckily the movie has excellent English subtitles which is a sure sign of it's international ambitions. Like Hero the movie is beautifully shot. The colours in this film are quite amazing.

Most of the movie takes place in Mother Nature's backyard. Amazingly this movie manages to take us through 3 seasons; summer, fall and winter. Even more amazing, the change of seasons takes place in a single day! Regardless of the lapse of logic and numerous loopholes in continuity there is no denying that the director has a keen eye for colour co-ordination.

The action is good although certainly not great. This is a given though as none of the stars in this movie are actual trained kung-fu artists. At times it is painfully obvious that stunt doubles were used to enhance the star's kung-fu prowess. For example, Zhang Zi Yi magically becomes a man several times during her dance sequences :)

The best parts of the movie are the flying daggers. Computer graphic enhanced daggers fly towards their targets at high speed... avoiding obstacles and always (well except for once) hitting targets. Though not believable it is certainly well done and enjoyable. If I was the director, I would put a tonne more of flying daggers in the movie simply because it looked so cool :P

My only major gripe with this movie was that it did not come from Hong Kong. Damn those Hong Kong movie producers! Why are they leaving all the good martial arts movies to be made by other countries now? None of the major kung-fu movies in recent years has come from Hong Kong. What happened to the good old Wong Fei Hung movies. What happened to Jackie Chan's yearly Chinese New Year extravaganzas? If Hong Kong movie producers were serious about bringing back the crowd to Hong Kong movies, a very good way to do so would be to create a damn good kung-fu movie.