Snake Crane Secret 蛇鹤丹心震九州

The story told here begins with three martial arts masters who fought each other over a secret manual on the snake and crane styles. One of them was killed, leaving his two children orphans, while the remaining two parted as mortal enemies. Twenty years later, one of the masters decides to find the now-grown children of his former friend to make sure they are all right, though in reality things are more complicated. The children were separated and raised in different surroundings, as a result of which one became a free-roaming traveler (Meng Fei) and the other (Dorian Tan) serves under the city governor, who is the second surviving master. It is not hard to guess that the brothers, unaware of who they are to each other, will soon meet in a deadly duel when the governor decides to wipe out the "Sun and Moon" rebel movement that Meng Fei's character has joined.

Impressions: On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with this film, and I'd even agree that it's a classic, but I doubt I'll ever watch it a second time. On the one hand, the picture has plenty of fights and a fairly complex plot, but on the other, it's all so tedious and routine that you start yawning by the fifth minute.

That whole storyline about a political conspiracy against the government was apparently meant to be interesting, yet there's not a whiff of excitement here. Instead we get a standard classic cocktail of betrayal, surprise attacks (both by the government and by the rebels), and a fight over some secret book that, for some unknown reason, has a full list of the rebels written on its back cover (why mutilate the book like that? Was there no paper around?). Personally, I wasn't interested for a single second, even though the cast is quite a pleasant one.

The situation with the fights is equally strange. There are many of them, but they're extremely long and monotonous, and the steady thud of blows is best used as a lullaby. Dorian Tan, who has a perfect command of kicks, barely gets a chance to show them off — he was given the snake style, which doesn't exactly welcome that sort of thing. It's quite possible that this is precisely what true connoisseurs of old-school martial arts cinema appreciate — the crane and snake styles are shown here in meticulous detail — but when a film doesn't particularly want to entertain me, I usually drift off to sleep. And I have to say, the dreams I have while it's playing are far more interesting.