Anyway, the story centers on an unassuming warrior played by Andy Lau. A city in the path of an army seeking to invade another kingdom is fearful of being swallowed up in the process, as the Zhao forces need to protect their rear and maintain a secure supply line. Therefore, the city seeks aid from the Mozi clan, famed for their defensive expertise.

It later turns out the lone hero who comes to their aid did so on his own conscience, as the Mozi clan actually did not want to get involved.

None the less, although he is not a veteran general who had never protected a city before, he convinces the local king to trust him as their only hope, and he is granted command of the garrison. Naturally, his skillful tactics and leadership stymie the enemy and force them to withdraw. It indeed becomes a "battle of wits" as the opposing general becomes obsessed with defeating this Mozi military genius, to the point of abandoning his original invasion of the other kingdom.

However, there's more to the plot than that. The success of the Mozi warrior breeds jealousy and resentment among the city's elite, and his popularity among the people and his preaching of "universal love" threatens the king's autocratic rule. Therefore, he is ultimately betrayed and arrested by the very people he risked his life to defend, only to escape with a little help.

In the meantime, the Zhaos prepare one last sneak attack, and it really amounts to a test by their general to see if this brilliant warrior is really so pure that he would return to again save the city that had forsaken him.

Although the story is inspired by the Era of Warring States prior to China's unification, the movie's creators do take some strange liberties. For example, Andy Lau's character rescues a Mandarin speaking black guy (how did an "African" fellow end up in 4th century BC China?), and there is a battle sequence where the Zhaos attack with from the sky via hot-air balloons, which looks rather corny to me.

None the less, aside from these fanciful elements, it's a fairly well told story of sacrifice, loyalty, honor, and the quest for peace in a troubled world.

The story follows a young man named Cheng, who is fleeing an arranged marriage because he loves another girl named Mei Ling and his prospective bride is a chubby but intimidating kung fu practitioner. He winds up in Shaolin, hoping to improve his skills and hide from his betrothed.

He meets a number of other men who have traveled wide and far to become disciples at the famous Shaolin Temple, but Master Heng, the scowling teacher assigned to them, does not readily teach them kung fu.

This basically follows a familiar theme that one must train hard developing mental, physical, and even spiritual strength and endurance before tackling martial arts forms and techniques. Thus the students haul water and firewood, work in the kitchen, and do all sorts of menial labor.

Eventually, a kung fu fanatic simply called The Ranger shows up at Shaolin. He was a former student, and a ferocious fighter, but his ambition is to be the best warrior, and not to achieve enlightenment. He attacks and nearly kills several Shaolin students, and humiliates the Abbott and other monks, who refuse to give him a duel for it violates their principles.

Ultimately, Master Heng begins to teach his students more kung fu, especially Cheng, who has the greatest potential. Heng even duels with The Ranger in an attempt to stop the latter's rampage, but the 18 Lohans sent by the Abbott intervene and force Heng to return the temple and be "punished" by sequestering him in a meditation hall. Cheng, who has improved his skills adequately enough, then goes out and defeats The Ranger once and for all in a final showdown.

Anyway, what makes this movie special is the unique "Chop Kick" technique, a really cool move that attacks an opponent's shins and the tendons above the heel, tripping and potentially crippling him. Building up endurance to absorb and deflect the kick is the best counter for it. No other movie I know of shows off this unusual and devastating "Chop Kick" maneuver, and to see it in action is alone worth the price of getting this movie.

This movie has fantastic training sequences, humor, and touching drama as the mean-looking Master Heng, who has a real compassionate nature behind the tough guy persona, cares for his students as a father would love his sons. Highly recommended.

Chocolate refers to the favorite candy of the lead character, a mentally disabled teenage girl named Zen. Her mother Zin was a former gang member, and the mistress of Bangkok's top underworld leader, but she fell in love with a Japanese yakuza man named Masashi. Zin separated from her lover and her past life to lead a quiet existence with her daughter.

However, by the time Zen is grown up, the mother is stricken with cancer and urgently needs money for her chemotherapy. Zen's childhood friend Moom finds a notebook with a list of names of people who owe money to her mother, and he naively takes Zen along to collect these debts.

Thus, Zen engages in a series of furious fights, having learned combat skills by observing the Muay Thai boxers practice next door, as well as watching movies and video games. She thus compensates for her mental disability with uncannily fast reflexes and an ability to quickly absorb new techniques.

All this butt-kicking arouses the concern of Bangkok's top mob boss, who is wondering what his former mistress is up to. It leads to a bloody showdown, and even Zen's father is drawn in from Japan. The final battle sequence where Zen chases the lead villain across multiple floors of a high-rise, leaping across the neon signs and ledges is particularly creative and well choreographed.

For any action fan, I highly recommend this title. Some measure of the intensity of the action can be discerned by the end credits which document a handful of the various injuries sustained during filming, not only to the lead actress, but by the many stunt men as well...bloody noses, bruises, broken necks, cuts, etc. It's absolutely a heck of a ride.

I found this 1980s adaptation to be quite good, although from the preview that showed presumably the original version with Mandarin dialogue and English subtitles, apparently this DVD version has been edited, as there's a scene where Huo battles a Western fencer that didn't appear in the 90 minute running time.

Also, the English dubbing transliterates the characters' names into their Cantonese versions, so the "Huo Yuan Chia" is addressed in this movie as something like "Fook Yuen Giap." For simplicity, I will follow the convention of the DVD synopsis on the back and continue referring to him as "Huo Yuan Chia."

Anyway, the training scenes are really good, especially the ones involving Yasuki Kurata, who plays Chiang Ho Shan, a Japanese karate expert to travels to China in a guise of a scholar to teach young Huo literary arts.

Ho Shan's real purpose is to secretly learn the Huo family fist style. Master Huo (played by Philip Ko Fei) has the ability to use chi energy to crush an egg inside a glass without breaking the glass itself. Master Huo also thinks his youngest son Yuan Chia is a weakling, and refuses to teach him kung-fu.

Ho Shan, who pities the boy, therefore secretly teaches him martial arts, and leaves him a training manual before returning to Japan after killing to two ruffians who try to harm Yuan Chia.

It turns out Ho Shan wants to learn the family skills mainly out of a desire to integrate many different styles, and encourages Yuan Chia to do the same. To go beyond clan and family restrictions, to spread the arts far and wide and learn from others...that seems to be message of the movie, and it's a good one.

Anyway, back to the story, master and student reunite many years later after Yuan Chia defeats an arrogant Japanese fighter, and Ho Shan is ordered by the Japanese martial arts society to challenge Yuan Chia to the death and avenge national honor.

Ho Shan is reluctant to have this fight, but he obeys and returns to China. When he finally meets his former student in the fighting gym, he deliberately does everything he can to enrage an equally reluctant Yuan Chia, who ultimately defeats his master. It is a tragic ending, however it is also apparent that Ho Shan is a great admirer of Chinese culture and still has a sense of fatherly love for Yuan Chia, and knowing that Chinese are bullied as weaklings (the time period is shortly after the Boxer Rebellion), seems to willing sacrifice himself to die at Yuan Chia's hands. After all, despite knowing the Huo family style he doesn't attempt to use it against Yuan Chia.

The movie ends with Huo Yuan Chia walking out the door to cheering Chinese crowds, and though he is saddened by his master's death, he vows to spread martial arts to the masses and develop national pride and sportsmanship.

The action combines real kung fu with unfortunately a good dose of wire work, which I tend to find ridiculously annoying. You can even clearly see the wires attached to the actors as they leap and "fly." There are also elements of slapstick comedy, which in the interviews it's explained that the creators tried to borrow a few elements of Jackie Chan's brand of kung-fu comedy, but I found the humor quite lacking.

Nonetheless, it's a straightforward tale of two young monks who grow up as friends but ultimately become enemies as each follows a different path in life. Jet plays Jun Bao, the younger monk, when the story opens in the legendary Shaolin Temple. He meets Tien Bao, played by Chin Siu Ho (who also co-starred with Jet in "Fist of Legend"), an older boy with an ambitious, headstrong streak. We see a flash of Tien's will to dominate when he pressures Jun Bao into calling him the "senior brother," even though their master intended it the other way around because Jun Bao came first to the monastery.

As young men, they get expelled from the temple when Tien Bao offends the master of an unscrupulous student and Jun Bao comes to his brother's defense. There's a great action sequence where the monks get into their "Lohan" formation, that is, multiple monks stand on their comrades' shoulders to form a daunting array of men with spinning sticks. The duo only manage to escape when they break the oil lamps in the hall to make the floors slippery, and their master also makes a timely intervention.

Anyway, once in the secular "real" world, Tien Bao's obsessive ambition draws him into the service of a corrupt eunuch who serves as the local governor, whereas the still innocent and idealistic Jun Bao is content with a simple, peaceful life and winds up in the company of rebel fighters.

An inevitable collision course is thus set, and Tien Bao's treachery temporarily drives Jun Bao into pyschological paralysis, but the latter eventually finds enlightenment in the Way of Tao, and becomes a Master of "Tai Chi."

It leads to a furious climax as Tien Bao, now a general, squares off against his one time brother, and is defeated because he has never learned to tame his impulsive instincts. However, it is not Jun Bao who kills him, but his mutinous soldiers who have become fed up with his tyrannical, ruthless ways. Jun Bao rides off and becomes the famous Cheung San Fung, the great Taoist master.

Overall, it's a good story with pretty good action, and despite a few quibbles here and there I'd definitely recommend it to any matial arts fan.

The synopsis on the back of the DVD relates that a king who recently subdued a minor state hopes to win over a powerful noble (played by Jimmy Wang Yu) to his side, and this noble has no greater earthly desire than to possess the finest and rarest swords. Thus the king organizes a dueling contest to lure this noble into his service by offering a generalship and a rare sword as the winning prizes.

I thus expected that the end result of the movie would be that Wang joins the king, only to re-discover his patriotism, and slay the conquerors of his city to liberate his people.

The movie turned out totally differently, and was more of a morality tale than anything else. As the plot unfolded, Wang does get the much coveted sword from the king, but he then hears of another, even more unique sword and goes to seek it out. His obsession totally corrupts him and he turns into a villain, murdering a retired swordmaster to get this 2nd sword.

In his triumph, he tries to pull the sword from its scabbard and fails, and when old Taoist sage passes by, he angrily demands to know why this sword is stuck. The old sage merely smiles and says that sword is truly unique because it had not been used in 20 years (and so it has rusted in the scabbard).

Wang Yu's character then has an epiphany and the movie ends with him bowing in remorse to the corpse of the old master. It is an unsettling, tragic ending. In a strange bit of make-up, his eyebrows merged into one while he was being evil, but in the end, they recede away and he has two normal eyebrows again.

Over all, the actors do a fine job, but I would've liked better action. The slow sword fights pale in comparison to the dazzling acrobatics seen in Shaw Brothers films from mid to late 1970s and early 1980s.

If you want lots of energetic fights where you can cheer the hero beating off hordes of baddies, as I had hoped for, this is NOT the movie for you. It is really a character development drama, and while it is poignant and fairly well done, that's not the reason I buy and watch kung fu movies.

Sammo admits that in order to keep the movie's running time under control he had to cut out a lot of material and risk upsetting many of his peers, so it could be interesting for a real Hong Kong movie aficianado to keep a running list of who's who among the big names that DON'T get to appear in cameo role (Jackie Chan is one of them who comes to my mind).

Fortunately, with the comedy sequences and the efficient editing, watching a bevy of characters constantly come and go didn't bother me much. The plot was very simple, involving a special train called the Millionaire's Express. A gang of bandits want to rob it, while a petty crook named Chen (played by Sammo himself) wishes to blow up a section of track used by that train, a segment which passes near his hometown of Hanshui. His goal is to compel the wealthy rail patrons to come to his sleepy village and spend money there. A brief flashback scene reveals he was mischeviously attracted to explosives as a kid, and he had blown up the town's dikes. Hence, this diversion of rail traffic is his scheme to pay back his town (and also line his own pockets in the process).

Along with the various characters in the town itself, and the government agent pursuing Chen, the stage is thus set for all sorts of people to converge on little Hanshui, ultimately resulting in a massive showdown pitting Chen and his friends against the nefarious bandits and even some Japanese agents (all in anachronistic samurai outfits).

Anyway, I highly recommend this film because it's unlikely anything like it will ever be made again. Before the advent of CGI, Hong Kong's top martial artists and stuntment dared to perform outrageous actions scenes. For example, watch at the beginning of movie how Yuen Biao jumps off a burning FOUR STORY building and lands unhurt, and then runs to speak some dialogue in a single take. Simply awesome!

Sammo also built a full scale town to use a set in a then undeveloped part of Hong Kong's New Territories, utilized a vintage locomotive in Thailand, and brought together an impressive array of Hong Kong's top entertainment names, so it's difficult to calculate the staggering cost of making sanything like it in similar fashion today.

It's a mix of the Old West and old China, with bits of silliness and bone crunching action, in short, the Shanghai Express is one fun ride.