After
achieving invincibility and stripping top warrior Nameless (Kenny
Ho) of all his powers,
the impossibly evil Lord Godless (Simon Yam) kidnaps the Emperor (Patrick
Tam) and appears
without obstacle in his quest to conquer all of China. Nameless tells
warriors Cloud (Aaron Kwok) and Wind (Ekin Cheng) that only Lord Wicked (Kenny Wong) has the power to defeat Godless now, a warrior so overcome by "the evil way" he was forced to cut off his own arms to avoid becoming totally
consumed.
Wicked suggests that learning the evil way may be the fastest way for Wind and Cloud to gain the necessary strength to take on Godless, but of course there is great risk involved. Wicked determines that only Wind has the strength of character to return unscathed from the dark side, while Cloud, who is way too intense, tutors under Nameless, developing his own signature sword style.
Adoring females Chu Chu (Tang Yan) and Second Dream (Charlene Choi) - in two of the year's most thankless roles - sit on a rock and wait patiently as their beaus risk all to save the country. Meanwhile, Godless searches for the Dragon Tomb while his similarly ruthless son, Heart (Nicholas Tse), waits patiently in the wings for his moment to seize power. Much to nobody's surprise, Wind's training transforms him into a deadly tool of all-powerful evil, (to say, it gives him Bad Wind), forcing Cloud to go head to head with his spiritual brother.
It may sound like a complex story, but precious little actually happens in THE STORM WARRIORS, save for a lot of posturing and swinging of swords. For the best part of the film's two-hour running time, the screen is filled with big hair, vast, impressionistic CG landscapes and much heroic posing. Aspiring to the same visual aesthetic as Zack Snyder's 300, this lacks the kinetic energy, engaging characters or exciting fight choreography (pretty much inexcusable for a production of this scale), instead seemingly content to repeatedly over- and under-crank every last scuffle, while smearing the screen with swirling clouds of digital distraction.
The entire last half hour consists of one long stand off between the two titular warriors, as their mullets flutter in the wind, they pout at each other intensely and occasionally whip up a computer-generated energy field to hurl at each other. At one point they actually stop fighting, glance up at a remote, yet infinitely more cinematic mountain top ledge, and relocate there to continue their staring contest in more aesthetically pleasing surroundings.
The Pang Brothers have proved in the past with the likes of 2006's RECYCLE that they can bring tension, scares and humanity to an effects-heavy production, but of-late their work has become increasingly shambolic. The notable qualities of early successes like THE EYE are quickly fading from memory, to be replaced by the mounting inadequacies on display in the likes of their woeful remake of BANGKOK DANGEROUS, teen romance BASIC LOVE and intertwining SEVEN 2 ONE. THE STORM WARRIORS sadly continues this trend.
Fans of films
like LEGEND OF ZU or
DRAGON TIGER GATE might find something to like here, but fans of the original comic book
series or Andrew Lau's original STORM RIDERS, must surely expect more than this. Watching THE STORM WARRIORS too often
proves to be more ordeal than entertainment, consisting as it does of little more than a few cool-looking images scattered across two hours of monotonous,
repetitive drivel.
Cross published in bc Magazine (Hong Kong)
More from Storm Warriors
- Reviews: Sitges 2010: THE STORM WARRIORS Review
- Reviews: NYAFF 2010: STORM WARRIORS Review
- News: Pang Brothers Martial Arts Fantasy THE STORM WARRIORS Hits DVD And BluRay In February!
- News: Get Behind the Scenes of THE STORM WARRIORS
- News: Music Video for Martial Arts Fantasy THE STORM WARRIORS
- News: Final Trailer For Martial Arts Fantasy THE STORM WARRIORS!
- News: Two Fresh Clips From Pang Brothers Martial Arts Fantasy THE STORM WARRIORS Impress!
I'm glad I didn't get my hopes up for this one. Lau had plenty of pouty, posing, photography as well, but obviously the CGI has evolved a lot since then. Thanks for saving me some money!
I sure hope Bang Rajan 2 doesn't end up the same way.
"this lacks the kinetic energy, engaging characters or exciting fight choreography (pretty much inexcusable for a production of this scale)"
Personally, I disagree. I found the action choreography in Storm Warriors to be far more exciting and fun to watch then the choreography in 300.
My favorite part of this was that EVERY TIME the plot needed to advance someone (usually someone you'd never seen before) would rush in from off screen and announce something like "Master, the person you're looking for has just been spooted over there", followed immediately by everybody rushing over there.
In my book. the Pang Brothers have never been anything more than overrated photographers. That they fail to deliver directorially comes as no surprise to me.
I love it when a review is more entertaining than the movie.
*Worse* coreography than STORM RIDERS? I find that pretty hard to imagine - the first movie was a disappointing mess of "people pretending to throw CGI fireballs at each other instead of actually fighting", and the trailers for this one at least led me to assume that there would be some honest-to-gods tactile *fights* here instead of Super-Sayian firefights.
Oh well.
This is a case where I'm just going to have to experience the disappointment for myself. I enjoyed the first one for what it was, without resenting it for what it wasn't. Maybe that'll be the case with this one too. The negative opinions sound pretty similar to the ones I heard in 1998.
As long as it's better than the horrendous animated CLASH OF EVILS movie that came out last year, I can't complain too much. How many gator attacks in STORM WARRIORS?
You dissing the awesome presence of the tree-gator? :)
the storm warriors is an incredible movie. the amount of fighting, use of slow-motion and stunning cgi bring the atmosphere of the manga to life.
my only critique is that it might have made more sense to split this into two movies leaving the first one on a cliffhanger (evil wind at large with the dragonbone). it would have allowed the pang bros to go more in depth with characterization and explanation of key plot points. but at the same time i respect them for not thinking their audience is stupid. the audience has to figure some things out for themselves, and i guess that's just too much to ask the average movie goer...
i also like that the pang bros stayed true to the story. the fighting and cgi in the final fight beautifully demonstrate cloud's hesitance to finish off wind despite the fact that wind becomes more and more consumed by evil. finally we see cloud, the ultimate warrior for good who has mastered his own immature inadequacies (essentially the plot of the storm riders) defeating his counterpart, now completely consumed by ultimate evil. not since the matrix revolutions have cgi and masterful choreography been so perfectly used to illustrate complex emotions (eg cloud's inability to finish wind) and major themes of good and evil (eg cloud's ba technique represented as golden fire ripping through the black cloud of evil chi emanating from wind).
it is a shame that critics fail to see how fighting and cgi can be used to tell an incredible story. it is the same thing critics of the matrix failed to realize. they blame audiences for being too intoxicated by the glow of cgi when critics themselves fail to recognize that the elements of action movies (especially martial arts films) that make them exciting also add depth to the story and characters.
as a side note, i think there may be a deeper meaning to the story of the storm warriors. as i watched it i felt the pang bros were making a statement about the way hollywood has glamorized action movies, stripping them of all meaning. similar to de palma's postmodern critique on postmodernism in scarface, i feel the pang bros make a critique on hollywood's infatuation with meaningless cgi with a big budget, cgi heavy flick. i could go into a big explanation about wind representing hollywood and cloud representing hong kong cinema, but i think i've typed enough for one comment.
I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did after all the bad ink it's gotten. I'm a big fan of Martial arts Fantasies and Ekin Cheng. I liked the original Strom riders and I enjoyed A man called Hero also. The sword fight between Aron Kwok was Nameless was priceless. I'm looking forward to another installment.