Review: The Flying Swords of Dragon's Gate

As I previously-mentioned, I obtained The Flying Swords of Dragon's Gate on DVD.

I'd heard a little about it and it's a Tsui Hark movie starring Jet Li. Totally worth the price to pick up.

Weird-ass movie.

It's the sequel to a story I know little about New Dragon Gate Inn. I expect the story might have made more sense if I'd seen that, but I'm uncertain if that's the case.

Badass swordsman Zhou Huai'an (Jet Li) is a rebel/Robin Hood like character who goes around assassinating corrupt government officials in Ming Dynasty China.

A bureau of corrupt officials, led by an uber-badass Yu Huatian, sets out to kill Zhou and to retrieve an escaped maid from the Imperial Court who is pregnant (possibly with the Emperor's love-child).

And then the story goes sideways. The maid is rescued by Ling Yanqiu, who is pretending to be Zhou and has some kind of mad crush on the man (I guess they have a history of some sort).

Ling helps the maid and takes her to the Dragon's Gate Inn, a rebuilt inn in the western desert that Ling seems to know intimately well (complete with a series of secret tunnels under the inn). She and the maid are pursued by Yu Huatian, who is in turn pursued by Zhou.

Meanwhile there's a group of con-artist criminals at the inn seeking buried treasure and one is a dead-ringer for Yu.

To say the story gets complicated from there doesn't begin to touch on matters. There's betrayals, reversals, and lots of wire-fu swordfighting. First time I've seen a swordfight in a tornado, to my memory.

Entertaining movie, if a little excessively-complex in plot. The ending left me scratching my head, but that's fine. Still worth the viewing.