The Four

[Drunk Monk]

This reunites Colin Chou with Greg and my fav Chinese starlet, Crystal Liu Yifei, and adds the great HK veteran Anthony Wong. It's a wuxia flick with a Shanghai Steampunk leaning, based on a popular modern wuxia novel. Okay, in all honesty, wuxia is basically Chinese comic books, and The Four has been unfairly compared to Avengers because it's a band of heroes with superpowers and issues. The special effects are decent. There's some nice fight scenes with fireballs and swords and a lot of flying about. I was entertained, although I started this before the Olympics and finished it somewhere before they ended, so I only saw it in chunks which is a good way to view effect-laden wuxia films. Crystal is really good in this. She plays this wheelchair-bound psychic/telekinetic, although her powers are never clearly defined as she can fight on crutches, see hidden intentions and Jedi objects like projectiles, including crazy-shaped shuriken flung at her by the dozen. Plus she has this weird steampunk wheelchair that can make her stand up as if on a dolly and mounts in this huge arm so she can reach all over this massive wall file of scrolls. The film had a lot of style with long panning shots and some cool imagery. Not a mind blowing flick, but an interesting example of the direction kung fu flicks are going now. I like fights with fireballs and swords.

[Drunk Monk]

Kingdom of Blood (2014)

Actually, there wasn't that much blood in this.  Definitely not a kingdom's worth.  Actually, this was The Four 3, the threequel to The Four. I watched it on Amazon Prime because I was reviewing some Crystal Liu flicks in anticipation of Mulan and it took me a bit until I figured out this was the threequel.  I pity anyone trying to watch this as a stand alone film.  It hardly makes a lick of sense, like I imagine watching Endgame would be like if you didn't know any of the characters or have seen any of the other films. I never saw The Four 2, but apparently Crystal wasn't in that one, which makes even less sense. That installment must have covered a lot of ground that was carried over into this one.  But I hardly remember the first one, so it didn't really matter.

This film is opulent in costume, sets and CGI, but there's a lot of talking and the fights are a lot of CGI qi blasts. Crystal's character mopes through most of the film, but she can throw shuriken from her hair to take out the legions of red ninjas that keep attacking the four like CGI snowflake dandruff. Her performance is lackluster. I got lost in what was happening - they were protecting the Emperor and the red ninjas have these zipgun-like pipe firearms and durian-like grenades that explode with CGI fire.  There's a lot of bad wire work where they didn't even try to make the trajectories look convincing.  There are sword fights, all accentuated by colorful CGI qi smoke.  Collin has cool tattoos.  Anthony Wong has a granny queue and eats a lot of hot pot.  In fact, there's a major fight where he just keeps eating hot pot while the others kill a lot of red ninjas. The villain is a white eyebrow qi vampire.  I'm not sure what happened in the end.  I might have dozed off a few times. 

Not DOOM recommended.