The story is quite unusual for a Jet Lee movie. Jet plays a novelist, Chow Si-kit, who writes adventure stories. In real life he is quite a timid character who is going through a divorce from his wife Monica, played by Rosamund Kwan. When he runs out of ideas for his latest novel he takes inspiration from the events of his life and in his books imagines himself to be a kind of Indianna Jones character. The film switches from real life to fantasy where all of the action takes place.

The International version had a much more straight forward plot where the modern day sequences were omitted altogether. Its good to see that Eastern Heroes have taken the risk and released the Hong Kong subtitled version, for which there is no English soundtrack, as this is far superior to the other.

Although it may not be as fight filled as some of Jet's other movies, it certainly is visually impressive at times with obviously quite a large budget for a Hong Kong film. What fight scenes there are show off Jet Li's skills brilliantly especially where he takes on a gang of Japanese ninjas. The only letdown comes in the films climax where the director opted to use special effects rather than have a good old fashioned knock about. Unfortunately the special effects are nowhere near to Hollywood standards and let the film down a bit. That said, what Ching Siu Tung can do with inventive camerawork and wires can often be more enjoyable to watch than the most expensive Hollywood special effects (thinking of the waste of time that was Godzilla).

As I mentioned before the original concept for this disk was to be double sided with both International and Cantonese versions of the film. Instead the disk includes 7 extra scenes that were filmed to pad out the International version to 90 minutes. Although there is no extra fight footage, they are still quite fun to watch despite being terribly dubbed into English.

This is definitely an improvement on the previous VHS release of the movie as now the subtitles have been completely remastered and obviously the pictures sharper. This is probably the best version of this film available and definitely Eastern Heroes best disk so far.