The greatest movie ever made..!
A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
View MoreThis is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
View MoreThe first must-see film of the year.
"Badge of Fury" (aka "Bu er shen tan") has one of the most misleading DVD covers ever. It shows Jet Li looming over central Hong Kong engulfed in flames. First of all, the movie is nowhere near as explosive as the cover makes it out to be. Secondly, Jet Li is not even the main star in the movie.The movie is a comedy action of sorts, which I didn't know, so I was a bit surprised when finding out. So does the comedy work? Sure, most of the time, but at times it was awfully forced and scripted. But if you do enjoy silly action comedy movies, then you will get some enjoyment out of the movie.The characters were colorful and the dialogue was oddly quirky enough to match the characters. But the movie was somehow lacking a deeper storyline and meaning, giving the movie a somewhat irrelevant sensation to it.It should be said that the actors were doing good jobs all round. I just wonder why Jet Li actually agreed to be in this movie, because it is really way off from his normal arena. And this is definitely not what you would expect from a Jet Li movie.One thing that puzzled me senseless was why the movie was in Mandarin language when it was filmed and set to take place in Hong Kong. It was just so stupid. It should have been Cantonese.All in all a mediocre movie that was nothing at all what the DVD cover presented it to be.
View MoreTo sum up this movie in one word: Silly.I watched it because it stars Jet Li, and because Corey Yuen is the action director. I knew of the super low score, but I thought, since Corey Yuen is involved, it at least has to have some decent fighting..? And it does. Sort of. Corey Yuen has worked with Jet Li and Jason Statham several times, (directed the first Transporter-movie) he is excellent, so I wanted to check this out.Anyhow. The movie is a comedy, think Kung Fu Hustle, only not funny. Basically it's like a cartoon. With cartoony sound effects, very weird "physics", and so on. It's just silly, like one time: someone is punched way up in the clouds by a tiny woman, and everybody laughs. Weird.The best thing about the movie though, is still the fights. Doesn't have that much fighting, but the fights are entertaining. Full of silliness, but still fun to watch. A little heavy on stupid looking wire-work, though.Also there's a lot of good, fake-looking mostly, but good use of CGI. Windows breaking, dents in cars, cracks and bullet-holes in walls, that sort of thing, and it actually really adds to the action. Destruction is always good in action-movies. But, even with some decent fighting, and big use of CGI, it is still not very good. The story is, well, I didn't really catch the story, as I watched minutes at a time, because let me tell ya, when it's no action going on, it's pretty boring. And it's stupid.
View MoreI bought this expecting a badass cop movie starring Jet Li. Instead, Jet Li's role is more like a cameo appearance and the film really is a bad comedy with occasional kung fu fight sequences thrown in. I did enjoy the few fight scenes contained here, but as a whole the film is awful.The story is inept, uninteresting and stupid. The humorous aspects of the film rely on crude jokes, slapstick comedy, over the top, ridiculous moments, as well as references to Jet Li's career (officer Huang Fei Huang). That said it might have been fine, except those responsible forgot to make it funny. This movie makes the most crude, lowbrow work of producer/director Wong Jing look like highly intellectual art. Jet Li has proved with his previous films he is a very capable actor that can carry all sorts of stuff. Even though he only had a cameo appearance, Badges Of Fury is a waste of Jet Li's talents and not a good project. Hopefully, Jet Li will be given more than five minutes screen time in the next Expendables installment, one would hope.
View MoreAs a long time Jet Li fan (regardless of the genre), I always look forward to films in which he appears.Promoted as an "Action/Adventure" film, 'Badges of Fury' is actually an "Action/Comedy" in the 'Beverly Hills Cop' vein via master filmmaker Stephen Chow... except that the action is totally embarrassing and the film is completely devoid of any comedy (unless you are 2 years old... which is actually an insult to 2-year-olds).Where to begin with this unmitigated disaster?Of the lead cast, Jet Li comes off best as the grizzled veteran cop. Regrettably, his comedic skills (and action talents) are sorely under-utilized. Michelle Chen struggles with a role that no one could possibly make believable (even for a supposed OTT comedy). Meanwhile, Zhang Wen mugs to the camera ad nauseum... to the point where you want someone... anyone... to shoot him and put the audience out of their collective misery. Action maestro Corey Yuen tries what he can with the fight scenes. Wire-fu is intentionally bad. The problem is that it never achieves the "it's so bad that it's good" level. Instead, it settles for just being bad... with even worse CGI work. The only stand-out is a brief sequence where a duel is fought on a round table embedded in a wall. But this is still not reason enough to sit through 94 minutes of agony.Things are certainly not helped by screenwriter Tan Cheung's lackluster, unfunny script. Logic, subtext and actual comedy are thrown by the wayside for... well, I'm not exactly sure. There are some interesting ideas here. But they remain undeveloped. With the exception of only a few actually laughs, the screenplay derives it's "humour" by aiming for the lowest, juvenile approach imaginable... something I didn't think possible until I saw this travesty.But ultimate blame lands at the feet of director Tsz Ming Wong. The key to any action flick or comedy film is timing; an artistic sense that Tsz Ming Wong is completely lacking. Scenes are painfully off-key, strained or just plain poor. He commands no sense of storytelling... instead, preferring to jump from one pointless scene to another. Logic is a foreign concept. Things happen because the director (and the script) wants them to happen. This might be fine if it all came together. Instead it just sits there. Unfunny. Bad. And painfully dull. In other words, avoid this movie at all costs.
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