I absolutely loved it. It's a period film, like JC's Project A movies, and is set in 1930 Chicago. The film starts off with JC doing pull-up exercises 30 feet above the ground on a metal rod. Throughout the film, we see Jackie exercising his kung-fu skills in odd, yet amazing ways.

One memorable fight scene comes early on when Jackie beats four guys up. His father told him to stop fighting, but instead of stopping, Jackie simply made it look as if he was taking all the punishment while dishing out none. In the end, the four bad guys are all limping, and Jackie made it all look like an accident.

Another cool scene was a roller-skating race which remarkably looks similar to the "Roller Derby" they show on TV these days -- only this skating race featured real fights and a brutal finish.

The final fight sequences are a lot of fun. We get to see Jackie take on guys three times his size, blinding them with his incredible quickness and agility. Jackie frustrates one opponent so much that he tries to run him over with a car!

All-in-all, this film contained a remarkable number of laughs, good fight scenes and an interesting plot. The subtitles, while intelligible, leave something to be desired. For example, they use "hair" instead of "heir." Still, I often find subtitles to be another source of humor when I watch Hong Kong films.

As Sang Kuan Chun and his three students travel from one challenge to the next, the foursome acquires a fifth--a young man named Siu Ying (Lee I Ming) who wants desperately to train under master Sang Kuan Chun to avenge his father's death. So he tags along, despite the master's insistence that he will not accept any more students.

Eventually we learn more about the master's past. His own teacher, before he passed away, left him the secret book of The Pai Mei Nine Strikes. However a masked man soon stole several pages of the book, leaving only six strikes. So, somewhere out there, is this unknown man, and he has the final three strikes of Pai Mei, which are supposedly the most deadly and can beat even the other six strikes.

And, since no old school martial arts flick would be complete without the "groveling idiot student becomes kung fu genius" transformation, master Sang Kuan Chun soon accepts Siu Ying and teaches him the six known strikes of Pai Mei. This all leads up to an exciting climax, where we learn the identity of the masked man who stole the Pai Mei final strikes and the identity of the man who killed Siu Ying's father, and master Sang Kuan Chun challenges his final deadly opponent to a duel in the hopes of retiring.

A very solid old school kung fu actioner, with a constant supply of acrobatic fight sequences, "The Seven Grandmasters" is renowned as a classic for good reason.

The film isn't terrific or bad, it kind of perpetuates itself as much by momentum as anything else. The acting is very good overall, and the subject matter (a dying man) is hard not to empathize with.

But actor Stephane Rousseau's emotionless performance as the dying man's son seemed out of place amid this otherwise very impressive cast. All the other actors really make their characters shine with personality and uniqueness, despite the fact that we only get to know them through short scenes mostly in a hospital room. Stephane Rousseau on the other hand has plenty of more complex scenes and the space to really give his character more of an arc, yet we didn't feel that he accomplished what he could have with this role. His under-acting was really the only standout low point in the film for us.

So don't come to the film looking for some big transformation on anyone's part. And certainly don't come to the film if you don't want to see a physically unappealing, dirty old man reminiscing endlessly about his past sexual exploits. This film works best, we suppose, as a simple showcase of normal, flawed people as they accompany a normal, flawed friend through the end of his life. So if you're big on sitting back and just observing people being people, you could do much worse.