Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Float like a Butterfly Sword

Butterfly Sword is a fun Hong Kong martial arts film with:
  • Lots of wirework
  • Unfathomable plot
  • Michelle Yeoh, which makes up for a lot
Michelle Yeoh leads a gang of assassins from the Happy Forest, including pretty boy Tony Leung. He is marries Butterfly, who is not in the martial arts world. Another one of the gang, Donny Yen, loves Yeoh, who loves Leung, who... Never mind. The arrangement of good guys/bad guys is just as complicated and easy to ignore.

The fights are great if you like the running on treetops style. Leung's trick is to stand on his bowstring and fire himself through the air - that kind of thing. I prefer a more realistic style, but this is done quite well.

But that barely matters when Michelle Yeoh is on screen. She has a hypnotic beauty that gets deeper every year (this is made in 1993, 7 years before Crouching Tiger). I think that's enough of a review.

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