The Brave Archer

source: The Brave Archer

Moviecut—The Brave Archer

She diao ying xiong zhuan

At the intro it drags a bit too long introducing a bit too many characters, being a little confusing at times. The number of characters showcased is rather more than in the 5 Deadly Venoms movie, while also being more boring. Overall it's a romantic movie with some decent kung fu in it and a couple of teachings. A lot of young people that are in schools think that memorizing useless crap won't do them any good, but that's wrong: it trains your memory. Without giving a spoiler, this movie will show a perfect example of that. It's worth about a 7 at most, but I gave it an 8 just to balance. There where some parts where the sound was just damn terrible, when of the characters kept playing some stupid "song" crap for probably 5 minutes, which messed up with my ears, that was a really bad decision but I think might have heard worse...

I can't believe the low score for this Chang Cheh epic. I think it is partly expectation (at least in the West). This is not a kung fu film with a minimal story to hold it together but a sweeping, rich story (based on Louis Cha's 'Legend of the Condor Heroes) that includes fighting and some kung fu. I would like to call this storyfu films. Like a Dicken's book (and most Chinese books) it contains a lot of characters, some of whom are meant to be people, others are attributes and others 'Heroes' in the more than human sense. The sets are wonderful with rich costumes and some very good acting - with Alexander Fu Sheng in top form and even has a romance in this film. If you like Chinese history / mythology watch this film and the others in the series. Magnificent epic with Chang Cheh in full control only spoilt by some editing holes (it probably was much too long originally for the studio) leading to confusion at times as to quite who is doing what to whom.