The Moon Warriors (Zhan shen chuan shuo, 1993)
Sammo Hung
Hong Kong
91 mins, color, Cantonese (English subtitles)
I am not impressed. It's true, and I never thought I'd say this about a film that has BOTH Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung. But there you go... heresy. Not that the film is bad, not that the acting is bad (these are quite decent, as a matter of fact). Something was lacking in the martial arts department and since the film is a thin wrapper for the fights, the entire enterprise ended up sorely lacking. The traditionally atrocious music did not help either.
Fei (Andy Lau) is a simple fisherman, who moonlights as a woodcutter, cook, and a master swordsman to boot. As he goes about his business hewing bamboo, he stumbles in the middle of a fracas in the woods and immediately joins in, naturally siding with the good guys. Turns out he has helped the dethroned emperor Yen Ling (Kenny Bee), who immediately befriends him. In a very Arthur-Lancelot type of story, the emperor (who is engaged in a blood feud with his own brother) sends Fei to bring his betrothed Yue Yar (Anita Mui), whose name is inexplicably translated as Moony. He does and they, quite predictably, fall in love with each other. As they are torn between their feelings and their sense of honor, the bloodthirsty 14th Prince (Kelvin Wong) closes in on the party, guided by his spy Hsien (Maggie Cheung), whose name is also inexplicably translated as... Merlin (maybe that IS appropriate).
The movie has two things to recommend it. First, there's the ending, which is not surprising by Hong Kong standards, but is quite unexpected anyway. This almost made the entire film worth the 90 minutes. Second, there's the absolutely brilliant role of the killer whale. I kid you not, there's a whale and it's great. There's no fishy animatronics here, make sure you watch the end credits: there's plenty of footage from the training sessions. Amazing. Regardless of his reputation as an actor, Andy Lau was far from impressive but he surely had fun with the whale.
The Universe DVD is pretty darn good (why can't they put out such good transfers of better films?) and despite minor scratches and dust, the picture is crisp and clear, there's little pixelation, and all the blur in the action comes from the way it was filmed. As I mentioned, the sound is horrible (mono), but who cares? The English subs are burned in, right below the Chinese ones, in what appears to be a very annoying trend with transfers from LDs.
Catch Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, and the whale. There's really little else to look forward to in this film. The cinematography, unfortunately, wasn't too good either, so not much visual candy here. Sorry.
April 21, 2001. BLS