Saturday, 5 October 2013

Movie Review: Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon

Tsui Hark is back again with his latest fantasy-action-drama-adventure-thriller epic - Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, which serves as a prequel to Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame released in 2010.

The film tells how the young Dee rise to become a respectable detective for the Tang Dynasty, befriends the doctor Shaluo (similar to Sherlock Holmes and Watson) and his rival, Chief Commissioner/Detective Yuchi, unravels and solves an intriguing mystery case which involves a plot to assassinate the royal family and palace officials to overthrow the entire kingdom.
In order to fully enjoy the film, it requires some suspension of disbelief from the audience for some of the fantasy or action elements shown in the film such as riding a horse underwater, 'Kraken' beast, parasites that can change a person's looks and behaviour entirely, flying around fighting in the air, etc.

Although the wire-action choreography was great and well handled throughout the film, but the action scenes gets a little too much and it feels tedious to watch as the film moves on. It took away the focus of the mystery plot and a lot of potential character development required in the film. However, most of the lead and supporting actors did a fine job in portraying their character roles.
The CGI has improved a lot and looked believable and realistic compared with past Chinese big budget films. Overall, it's still a watchable, entertaining Chinese big budget production comparable to Hollywood standards.


Rating: 7.5/10

                             
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1 comment:

  1. Hi,
    I just wanted to let you know that parts of your review have been plagiarized on here : http://japancinema.net/2013/10/15/young-detective-dee-rise-of-the-sea-dragon-review/
    A year ago it was found that most of the reviews on that website were plagiarized from elsewhere (including my modest blog). The fraud that run this website removed a lot of the incriminated reviews, but left some.

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