Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

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."

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

"Moonlight Sword & Jade Lion" tells us about a young fighting lady, played by Angela Mao, who is on the search for an old master. Nobody has seen him for months, it appears, so she keeps asking people "have you seen him?" and sometimes she fights them if she doesn't like the reply. Now, the movie has a couple of memorable moments, such as the hilarious fight against roughly 20 enemies at once who are holding flowers (sic!) which can shoot flames or darts. That doesn't help to disguise the fact the story isn't exactly Sherlock Holmes. The heroine spends a month wandering around looking for clues, doesn't find anything important, and most characters just seem to be introduced to confuse her and the audience a bit. And if they do intend to tell her anything, they suddenly have a knife in their back. It was a relief to see in the other reviews that nobody else understood what the Jade Lion was for, either. So in the end, "Moonlight Sword & Jade Lion" is worth watching only for fans of Angela Mao who bravely carries on despite the lack of story progress.

I was really looking forward to this : Angela Mao and Don Wong Tao together, but apart from a few scenes this is a disappointment. First the Dynasty print is pretty poor (a VHS transfer ?) and why they didn't change the extremely poor dubbing is beyond me. I'm still not sure if it was the dubbing or poor editing that led to me wondering what was going on most of the time. Numerous characters come and go and who Don Wong was meant to be was lost on me. It starts slowly with a rather stiff acting Angela Mao (with rather strange hair style even for a Chinese film) wandering around looking for her masters missing brother. The fights are mediocre and occasionally contain some strange weapons which seem to work poorly. There is a lot of unnecessary wire work and the settings look cheap and flimsy at times. The beautiful Doris Lung pouts a lot but her fight with Angela should have been a highlight - and wasn't. Man Kong-lung as a poisoned (presumably black mailed) swordsman has several pretty poor fights. HK Cinemagic mentions Ti Lung in the cast but this is either a mistake or he was very well disguised. Definitely not one of Angela or Don's better films. What a shame this could have been so good.

'Moonlight Sword And Jade Lion' is one of my all time favorite movies.I think I like it because the main idea is Angela goes out on her own to find a friend of her father's and find out the truth about her parents' murder.A sub plot is this guy has one of a pair of jade lions and if he gets the other one he will become 'master of the Kung Fu world'. However it's not clear to me why.The sound on 'Moonlight Sword' is bad and it's in the wide screen format. On my TV this only uses about 50 percent of the available screen. I don't understand why people like this format.This was a different time in history where there was no mass communications. This guy wants to have a meeting with someone so he throws a knife at the guy's face and shouts "Get in touch with me.".There's also two guys who I think are twins (one the good guy and one the villain) and they kill people by throwing big knives into the back of their heads just when they are going to say something important."You don't understand. It wasn't our fault. We were under orders from .......UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !" To me the greatest scene is Angela gets surrounded by these gals who are carrying explosive flowers. She takes them all out with her telescopic spear.Then she goes into the 'temple of doom' that has various hazards such as flying saw blades.Jeff Marzano

MOONLIGHT SWORD AND JADE LION is a frequently confusing kung fu tale about a swordswoman (Angela Mao) seeking the brother of her late teacher in order to learn who killed her parents when she was a baby. That's basically all the film is about, but it takes 90 minutes to get there and only after the film bogs down with a lot of pointless intrigue involving a host of other characters skulking about trying to kill each other. It's never entirely clear who these characters are or what their connection to the action is, but the film gives us lots of scenes with them. One character, played by Wong Tao, is set up as the male lead and potential partner of Angela, yet he vanishes for the whole middle section of the film as if the screenwriters had simply forgotten about him.The good news is that Angela is very attractively garbed in a pink-and-white outfit and appears in a lot of fight scenes. The fights are generally short and overly gimmicky (with flying plates and chopsticks and such), but Angela gets to do a lot of swordplay and acrobatics and makes the whole thing worth watching. Wong Tao (THE HOT, THE COOL AND THE VICIOUS) is the only other notable fighting star on display, but he doesn't get to fight enough. Lung Chun Erh, another fighting femme and always an appealing presence (see SHAOLIN INVINCIBLES and THE MAGNIFICENT), appears all too briefly as one of Angela's enemies and fights her in one scene over the jade lion of the title (whose significance is never adequately explained).The exemplary sets and costumes are all displayed to great advantage in the high-quality letter-boxed print available for review. The English-language soundtrack, however, suffers from some of the worst dubbing yet heard in a kung fu film. The voice used for Angela is particularly annoying. The English track omits so much key info that one wonders if much of the original dialogue hadn't simply been ignored by the translators. The music track consists largely of cues lifted from Italian westerns.