A Man Called Hero: Special Cut

A Man Called Hero: Special Cut
by Ekin Cheng, Wai-keung Lau

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DVD Reviews of A Man Called Hero: Special Cut

DVD Review: A Total Disappointment
Summary: 1 Stars

Plot=1.5 (on a scale of 0-5)
The orginal comic book offers plenty of stories to make its movie version exciting, not to mention the many sophisticated lines of dialogs. For the movie, there is only one single story line. And it does not make sense in some important parts of the story. For example, how could anyone let the "evil foreman" to even get physically close to Hero's wife when she was givin birth to the twin and let him kidnap one of the children. Secondly, there are simply too many subplots (still along the same story line) that the screenwriter (or whoever was responsible) wanted to "jam" in, which makes those who did not read the comic book have a difficult time following what is going on. Given that the movie is more than 2 hour long, the director did an extreme poor job in developing the characters, a component so crucial in the success of the original comic book series. Finally, as a side note, it does not make sense that most of the characters do not seem to age in the movie over a period of 16-20 years.

Action Sequence=1.5 (on a scale of 0-5)
Even though Ekin Cheng and the rest of the young actors lack the martial arts or acrobatic trainings of Jet Li or Jackie Chan, the director should at least recruit the help from action choreographer/director like that in Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon to make up for the inadequacy. What seems to me is the producer used computer generated effects to substitute for good, hard-core, action choreography for its own sake rather than to use it to enhance the portrayal of the characters or to add favor or excitment to the plot. What was said by the other viewers were completely true; each of the fight scenes only lasted for 2 seconds.

Moreover, Hero is famous for his "Limitless Palm" (excuse my translation) in the original comic book series. There is no mentioning of it in the movie. The only scene that may have shown it is when Hero created a explosion when the cowboys were running toward him in the later part of the movie. "Limitless Palm" is supposed to be an art that generates the power of an extraordinary physical thrust (in physics term). An explosion like that of TNT is simply a poor portrayal. Given that the orginal comic book offers copious supply of beautiful kung fu moves of Hero and other characters, the movie adaptation is a complete disappointment.

Acting=2.0 (On a scale of 0-5)
The only good aspect about this movie is that Ekin Cheng does look like Hero in the comic book. Other than that, the acting or the directing is extremely poor. At the scene where Hero's wife died, I could not really tell if Cheng was crying or he was just grimacing. In short, Hong Kong's entertainment industry has cultured a shallow taste among its audience in a way that "a collection of pretty faces"="good ticket selling power". Unlike its Hollywood counterpart, older and more seasoned actors/actresses have a very deminished role in any new movie. The "pretty face" phenomenon may well bring in good profit from the young Asian crowd; however, it, together with poor plot/acting and action sequence would simply give Hong Kong movies and the taste of their audience (given that it's the top selling movie in 1999) a bad reputation worldwide.

Description of A Man Called Hero: Special Cut