True Legend (5/10)

A very old fashioned and traditional storyline of how a kung fu master loses to an opponent, suffers a great loss, disappears from society, finds an even stronger master and trains in a cave, then comes back and finish said opponent.Yuen Woo Ping hasn't sat in the director's chair for many years now. Whether he was ever any good, I can't say. But this one wasn't. Then again, it could be the fault of writer To Chi Long, whose past few screenplays were all much better than this, while this one was just boring.I guess when it came to the dramatic bits, Yuen really failed in that area. Those parts where Zhao Wen Zhuo's character was recovering while his wife took care of him, bored me to death. Not to mention most of the cast were over-acting their parts, perhaps to compensate for the lack of direction from Yuen. Only the kid playing his son seemed to have his character down pat.And when it came to story development, I just couldn't accept (spoiler alert) that the two gods weren't real; which meant that Zhao trained himself and that just made no sense at all. How could he become a better martial artist by smashing himself with those big jugs? I thought that was just a very easy way out for To to write the story this way. Instead of having that totally different story in the last one quarter of the movie where David Carradine came in to spew some ridiculous lines, To could have focused more on Zhao's recovery and training. Though To could have been under the instruction of Yuen to keep the storyline simple as Yuen is all about the action, isn't he?And that's one thing that's done very well, the action bits. That was where Yuen and Zhao shone. And that was what the movie was all about, and what that lost one quarter of the movie was created for. So again, this was a very typical Chinese kung fu movie, where the action took centre stage while the story took a backseat.