Brief Story Line
Qing Ming (Chen Kun - Painted Skin, Chongqing Hot Pot etc) was a former member of bureau for capturing demons, but left due to incident which involved his senior brother Ci Mu (William Chan - Genghis Khan, L.O.R.D etc). Qing Ming was also regarded as a traitor by the bureau despite his very close relationship with the leader Bai Ni (Zhou Xun - The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, The Equation of Love and Death etc).
Meanwhile, a capital guard named Bo Ya (Qu Chuxiao - The Wandering Earth, Bloody Romance etc) encountered Qing Ming during a major task and became obsessed in capturing him. He went to the demons world together with a young woman named Shen Le (Shen Yue - Meteor Garden TV series 2018 version etc) who was trying to find Qing Ming as well. Things became dangerous when the king demon started to execute his plan to return and rule the human world.
So what would happen to them all? Find it in this fun fantasy movie.
End of Brief Story Line
As I said above that I saw a different version of the film with same two lead characters just a little over a month ago, and I kind of had a picture in my mind about them. However, when I saw this movie, it totally surprised me with the lead cast playfulness. Instead of elegant, Qing Ming here seemed naughty while Bo Ya was a rather naive inexperienced officer and not serious at all. In addition, there were many demons appeared in here who were more funny and goofy rather than scary. It really made the movie's tone light and fun.
Despite the focus was still on Qing Ming and Bo Ya, the other cast were given large portion too. The bureau's leader Bai Ni and that young Shen Le had quite long screen time presence. In this movie, I felt the special effects and CGI were good. Although there were few scenes that looked obviously computer generated, I was satisfied with the demons effects as they looked quite life like. In fact, sometimes I felt the demons took quite center stage in here (really love that Red Ghost). It feels a bit like watching Star Wars movies with so many different demons who looked like aliens from other planets.
The fights in this movie were quite frequent with some of them looked wonderfully choreographed. That climax scene was great with some intensity and a bit dramatic. The pace was quite fast with story unfolding in not a slow manner. While the other movie (again because I just watched that one, I could not help comparing these 2 films) felt to be focusing on beautiful scenery and cinematography, this one focused more on the funny demons and Qing Ming's personal conflict. Plus there was no strong bromance in here.
Chen Kun was OK as the sometimes playful sometimes brooding Yinyang master, while Qu Chuxiao was surprisingly suitable as this type of Bo Ya (he played a completely different character from the movie and series I have watched previously). Zhou Xun did not truly excel in here while Shen Yue was more impressive (perhaps due to her extrovert character). There were some nice music but no really memorable theme song.
Overall to me this was a quite entertaining fantasy movie which was fun due to the funny demons with a pretty standard story of human versus demons. It has enough fight scenes to satisfy those looking for fighting sequence in period movie and quite fast pace that did not make duration of 1 hour 53 minutes feel too long. Btw, there was a post end credit scene which perhaps taken from the video game Onmyoji (not really sure as I never played the game). Due to its different story, characterization and tone, I considered this one as a new movie which happened to be adapted from same game, and as such I was not unhappy when this film was not entirely similar to the other. So if you like Chinese fantasy movie with attributes like I mentioned earlier, then you should be able to enjoy it.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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