The Battle of Red Cliff

This is the most expensive Asian-financed film till date, with Chinese roots and made by John Woo. John Woo has made several remarkable and memorable movies, i.e. Mission: Impossible II (M:I-2), Face/Off and Broken Arrow. After some not so successful movies after M:I-2, he has made this record breaking Chinese movie.

The Battle of Red Cliff offers the story of battle of Red Cliffs and events during the end of the Han Dynasty in China in year 208. After watching several breathtaking Chinese movies, I had huge expectations for this movie which fell apart. The movie has several good action sequences and is all right made. But as the director has shown in some of his earlier movies, there is lack of use of feelings, which reduce the involvement of the viewer. However, the most interesting part of the movie was several aspects of strategy, and particularly war strategy.

Rating: 4 of 6

The Forbidden Kingdom

All right kung-fu action adventure movie. It’s first time that Jackie Chan and Jet Li are acting together in this film. The movie has nice choreography, cinematography etc etc, but still the story wasn’t that inspiring.

Rating: 4 of 6

Curse of the Golden Flower / Slaget om den Forbudte By

Wonderful epic movie from China, which is directed by Zhang Yimou. He has previously made the House of Flying Daggers (Flyvende Dolker) and the amazing Hero as well, and he has proved himself again. As the mentioned movies, this movie is also set in a historical context for around 1000 years ago. It’s about the Tang Dynasty, and the story deals around the intrigues in the family. Some people will say that the story is inspired from William Shakespare.

The movie is full of colourful visuals, beautiful choreography and good story. A must see!

Rating: 5/6 of 6

Kung Fu Hustle

A really great action comedy movie. The comedy could have been taken from a comic book, which is understandable to people here in the West as well. In addition, there has been worked on elements like sound design and visual design to give the movie a comedy look. The action scenes are also great and hilarious.

Rating: 6 of 6

Fulltime Killer

Cool action thriller with good action scenes. I got this movie several years ago, and didn’t prioritise to watch it until now. The only thing I didn’t like with it was that some faces were too similar which made it difficult to know who the person was.

Rating: 4 of 6

Fist of Legend

”Fist of Legend” is a Chinese kung-fu movie with Jet Li, and came in the middle of 90’s. Its story continues from where Fearless ended.

The movie has average entertaining value, and several good scenes.

Rating: 4 of 6

Fearless

Fearless is a Chinese martial art action movie with Jet Li. This is in fact Jet Li’s last action movie with historical story. The movie has beautiful shot martial art action scenes as in “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” and “Hero”. In addition, it has some powerful drama scenes which mean that the movie isn’t just an action movie but also has other qualities.

It is actually difficult to grade such kind of movies, because my experience says that their grading tend to improve the next time I watch the movie again because you’ll notice other cool things which you didn’t noticed first time. Still, I give it following grading:

Rating: 5 of 6