Legend of the Black Scorpion

2006 Elizabethan martial arts

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Just like Hamlet if was set in 10th Century China and the main character was the mother instead of Hamlet.

Whatever-this-movie-is-called looks pretty good (and really expensive), but the style--lofty and pompous--left me flaccid. Grand and operatic, it felt like the equivalent of reading something that people say is great literature and thinking, "Yeah, this sort of resembles great literature" but not really digging it. The story's fine (it is Hamlet after all), but the story-telling is clunky and strangely dispassionate. It's probably silly to complain about the dialogue since that could be entirely due to translation, but a lot of this stuff was difficult to wade through. The fight choreography is cool as expected from the always-reliable Yuen Woo Ping. Even though the blood looks cheesy and there's too much reliance on the fantasy fighting rather than anything remotely realistic, the movements and costumes (the armor, masks, flowing robes) make the action sequences look almost like ballet instead of violence. It's a fine enough example of wuxia but definitely nothing earth-shattering enough to get excited about.

Here's what the back of my head looks like when it's not really excited: