The Age of Commercialism

Sadly Over-hyped

Just perfect...

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Vowed to remain silent until his father was avenged, Dubbed "dummy" by the other students, he proved himself more than capable as a fighter.I bought this video some years back and I recall it had the title "Shao Lin Temple of Doom". I remember the plot very well as it was one of my favourite Jackie Chan movies. The wooden men reference made me wonder if it was the same film and the synopsis from others here assured me it was. It may possibly have been that the company doing the packaging for the DVD I bought didn't translate the tile at all, they probably tried to use the cover picture to figure out the translation and got it totally wrong.As usual, Jackie Chan is a master at injecting a little comedy into an otherwise, serious story. He also does all of his own stunts and often there is an out takes section at the end of his film showing, not only forgotten lines and such, but some ways his stunts have gone terribly wrong. He often pushes the limit of human capability with his stunts and pays for it with injuries. However, the final result makes you wonder if he used camera tricks to do it but no, he doesn't do camera tricks to make himself look almost superhuman, it comes naturally.

A Jackie Chan movie is like pizza, even when it's bad it's still pretty good. First the good, it's a standard revenge plot. There's nothing wrong with seeing that for the millionth time. We're here for the martial arts not the story and the martial art does deliver. Even the hokey part fighting the wooden men (which easily could have failed) was done surprisingly well. The movie never dragged and the funny parts were reasonably funny. There was the expected build up to the big fight at the end and the fight finale could have been better but again, that pizza analogy. It could have been better if the antagonist delivered more speed and power in his moves, something which he seemed quite capable of doing. The bad part was making Jackie a mute until the last fight. Whoever's idea that was (did I hear someone mumble Lo Wei?) totally blew it. Really, not that I love to hear his voice or anything and it would have been dubbed by some British guy anyway, but the hero has to say a few syllables. I really think that keeping Jackie silent made the difference between this movie being a miss instead of a hit on it's initial movie theater run. Think of how history would have changed if Jackie came to stardom in 1976 instead of a few years later! The world would be a different place and we all might have our flying cars if Jackie had only spoken up sooner.

Jackie Chan stars in a role that could have been taken by...hmmm...lets say...anyone. This coming of age tale detailing the life of a mute-struck kungfu student and his eccentric teachers, is not as bad but just as weird and predictable as any other kungfu tale.Your basic unlikely hero emerges from his shell to rise to the occasion, type of thing.You're better off with sci-fi on this one folks. Either find a Hong Kong comedy or a nice piece of camp-like "Vixen!"I hope this helps,The Lazy Southerner

If you like Jackie Chan and have never seen this film, you sould hurry to the video shop in your neiborhood right now. This is definitely the BEST in his early 70's.It was made with very cheap budget the same as his other 70's films made by Lo-Wei,so "Wodden Men" robots looks so shabby, even kids will find out that.But Jackie did his best in both acting and action on this. This film was shown in Japanese movie theatre soon after he became popular in Japan with "Drunken Master", and this movie is still popular in Japanese fans (so they said in many Japanese websites!!)