The effects, photography and stunt work are all top- notch and make up for the uninspired plot. I'm sure you can easily imagine how the wacky monks will show up towards the end. The plot follows no new ground except for the insane action climax of the film. The man who uses the boy is more sharply defined by the time the first third is over. Aside from the extreme shorthand storytelling the first problem is how little we get to know the main character until way into the movie.
Al this happens in the first 20 minutes with most of it happening in the first 10 minutes. This leads to a big fight, the boy's expulsion from the monastery and the man's decision to turn the boy into a college basketball sensation. The boy is found throwing garbage into a basket from an incredible distance by a man who bring him to a gangster's club to play darts. The new master gets mad at the now 20+ year old boy for not pretending to be hurt by the master's weak punches and throws him out for the night. The school is taken over by a phony kung fu master who is assisted by four wacky monks. The old monk teaches the boy but expires when he tries to master the special technique in the manual. A homeless man brings him to a Shaolin monastery that's in the middle of a city along with a special kung fu manual that the homeless man somehow has but can't read. A baby is abandoned next to a basketball court. The production is excellent and the pacing is fast so it's easy to get past the many flaws in this film. There's magic kung-fu, college romance, sports, gangster action and some weepy melodrama for a topping.
A mess of genres but it's mainly based on Stephen Chow's genre mash-ups for it's inspiration.
0 kommentar(er)
