Last night I was curious about the sequel to Ang Lee’s cinematic classic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon so I stayed up till midnight to watch the sequel produced by the Weinstein Company and released by Netflix. I fell asleep halfway through the show and woke up to finish it so I could write a few words about it.
While the image and martial arts choreography generally look good, the story and characters are non-existent. There really is not much of a story and the characters talk like they’re reciting bad subtitles in English.
“If he’s a good man, get to know him. If he’s a poison dragon, klll him.” I was like… “What poison dragon?” It doesn’t make sense in either English or Chinese.
Such is the artistically disastrous follow-up to Ang Lee’s instant classic. While the first movie was made for a measly 17 million USD, the sequel was made for at least double that budget resulting in a mediocre TV movie that I would be upset if I had paid to watch it in the theaters.
The good thing about the movie is that a lot of friends worked on it both in front of and behind the camera and it seems they got paid pretty well from it.
Other than that Crouching TIger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny falls into the historical ditch of Chinese co-production corpses.
