I saw the poster to this movie a while back in the cinema and was looking forward to it as it starred Donnie Yen and it's also a sequel to the 2014 movie titled Iceman which had a cliffhanger ending. So when it finally premiered few days ago, I wanted to see it immediately. But alas, it did not play in a lot of theaters and we had many activities during the past few days. Until last night my wife and I finally got the chance to see it. OK, let's move on to the film now.
Brief Story Line
Set exactly after the first movie, He Ying (Donnie Yen - Chasing The Dragon, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story etc) decided to return to his time during the Ming dynasty period to try and change the fate of his family and friends while leaving his friend/savior in the modern world May (Eva Huang - The Sorcerer and the White Snake, Kung Fu Hustle etc).
He Ying wanted to do so together with his old friends from kids, i.e. Niehu (Yu Kang), Sao (Wang Baoqiang - Kung Fu Jungle, Detective Chinatown series etc) and Cheung (Simon Yam - Naked Killer, Exiled etc). But things did not exactly go according to his plan as he would later find out, especially with the appearance of Japanese army led by Hojo (Yasuaki Kurata - Fist of Legend, Shinjuku Incident etc).
So what would happen to He Ying? Find them all in this movie.
End of Brief Story Line
As I said above, this movie was a sequel to the 2014 movie which my wife and I kind of enjoyed. I felt that movie was pretty entertaining, especially the funny moments that would occur when a person 400 years before arrived in a modern world. It also had few decent fight scene with a finale that was quite amazing. When the movie ended with a cliffhanger, and there were hints of the second movie shown after the end credit scene, I was surprised that it took 4 years for the sequel to be finally released. I honestly did not know the reason for this.
Anyway, the director Raymond Yip (Cook Up A Storm, Bruce Lee, My Brother etc) was kind enough to give us the background story from the first movie in the first 5 minutes or so. Which unfortunately did not suffice for the audience who had not seen that one as it might be a bit confusing. The movie itself was quite fun in the early part, but it later on focus more on the drama side, which ultimately built to the grand finale.
Now this was when the movie became disappointing to us. The time travel story might still be acceptable to me since I am a fan of time travel (although in here, the logic was not properly thought of). However, I thought the final fight scene was totally ruined by the insistence of the director to show the special effects where the CGI was poorly done. It was supposed to be a grand fight scene between Donnie Yen and Yasuaki Kurata who used to be the villain in many Hong Kong movies in the past decades (His fight with Jet Li in Fist of Legend was quite memorable) but it was really not satisfying.
And another thing that was not enjoyable was the philosophical aspect that I personally thought took too much screen time. Instead of making us feel the movie had a deep moral message, it had an undesirable effect of confusing and making us want to just skip to the good part, which unfortunately were too little. One thing that my wife and I liked were the songs playing in the background during the drama moment & also during the end credit scene (unfortunately I could not find what the titles were and sung by whom). My wife jokingly said that if we want to have a more satisfying finale, we need to see a third movie. But unlike the first movie, this time it did not have any scenes from the future movie, so there will not be a third movie (Thank God!).
Overall, this was a disappointing sequel. A much lesser quality than the first one which was at least enjoyable and more entertaining. The movie seemed to be too short and did not have an appealing story with having too much philosophical aspects and a confusing dissatisfying ending. With only 88 minutes duration (which included the quite long scenes from first movie), it seemed to have insufficient time to show more story development which I thought would have been nice, especially about He Ying's family and the conflicts related to the character Jade. Even the fights scenes which I am sure audience were looking for, were too brief. I think the drama Big Brother had more and at least had an amazing finale fight scene. I also heard many complaints and sighs of disappointments from the audience when the movie finished
So if you are looking for Donnie Yen's quality movies, I think you can definitely skip this one. It was certainly not one of his best and not even a decent movie. But of course if you are his die hard fan, you are still welcome to see this film. If you want to give this a try, my suggestion would be see the 2014 movie first, to understand the story better. However, be warned that you might be disappointed like my wife and I did. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
PS: The 2014 movie was a remake of the 1989 movie titled The Iceman Cometh starring Yuen Biao and Maggie Cheung. It also received few nominations in the Hong Kong film awards which was probably the reason for this 2 parts remake.
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