This movie is pretty fun, kind of a mix of Highlander, Iceman and Time After Time. The fairly simple plot has Yuen Biao as a royal guard chasing rapist/murderer Yuen Wah. The two meet (and fight) on a mountain, and somehow they trigger a Buddhist shrine which freezes them in the mountain. Flash forward about a thousand years, where a team of scientists unearth the two. Through a mishap by some bumbling would-be thieves, the two are unfrozen and take their first steps into the modern world. Biao wanders about and eventually meets up with Maggie Cheung, the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold. She manages to bamboozle Biao into thinking that women hold all the power in modern times, and turns him into her slave. Meanwhile, Wah is up to his old tricks and it's only a matter of time before the two warriors must clash again.

Like I said before, this movie is fun -- if you don't take it too seriously. The script has enough holes to drive a truck through, not the least of which is that no one seems to notice the scientific discovery of the century just walked away. There's also a bit too much of dependence on the cliched "fish out of water" plotline and jokes (i.e., Biao thinks the toliet is a bath, there's demons in the TV, etc.). Some of the costume designs are just plain silly. Maggie Cheung always wears ridiclously oversized earrings, and Biao's outfit for the final duel between himself and Wah looks like a reject from a low-budget Road Warrior rip-off. And, a bit more disturbing, there's an extended and violent rape/murder sequence which seems really out of place with the rest of the movie, which comes off as more family-oriented (no sex or bloody violence). I guess I should have probably expected as much from the director of Naked Killer, but I think Yuen Wah does good enough villains that we really don't need to see any of his actions explicitly to get what a bad guy he is supposed to be.

As you might expect for a movie with two Yuens in it, the fights are really good. I just wish there was more of them. This movie runs at about two hours (much longer than the usual 80-90 minutes for a HK movie) and it could have really used another fight or two to punch it up in the middle, which tends to drag on a bit.

A review of the DVD for this movie can be found here

Back to Movie Review index