Review: Upon release in 1994, the reasonably big-budgeted Dragon Chronicles crashed like a wireless wuxia warrior at the Hong Kong box office, being placed 57th that year. The script derives from a complex novel by wuxia pien guru Jin Yong, but bowdlerizes the source material out of recognition. Despite having Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, Gong Li and Sharla Cheung Man, heavyweight stars from Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong, the film’s box office in other territories matched its Hong Kong performance…and reputedly did the reputation of “serious” actress Gong Li no favors.

As with most thoroughly vilified films, the passing of time has been kind to The Dragon Chronicles. No doubt the movie is a mess, with the plot regularly collapsing into incoherence, but it retains that awe-inspiring magic that fans of wirework wuxia pien cinema love. The film is a dazzling light show of stunningly-choreographed aerial combat, powerfully-destructive magical kung fu stances and patently-artificial special effects that meld perfectly with this hallucinatory world.

But, while thrilling the eye and igniting the senses The Dragon Chronicles fails to engage on any emotional level. Screenwriter Cheung Tan was clearly overwhelmed by the complex source novel, and is reduced to introducing the relationships between the main characters via a muddled voiceover seconds into the film. The basic plot of the movie is reasonably simple, but frequently vanishes in a welter of incidental detail and character motivations that whiplash between extremes, leaving the audience bewildered as to who, if anyone, they should be rooting for. Cheung had previously scripted the finely crafted remake of Dragon Inn (1992) that, along with numerous characters being introduced and forgotten in the same shot, suggests that some major re-editing left a lot of character development on the cutting room floor.

Workmanlike director Andy Chin Wing-keung fares better. His most interesting movie in an underwhelming career, Chin nevertheless succeeds in creating a gaudily-exaggerated, though believable, martial world. The Heroic Trio’s cinematographer Poon Hang-sang, who lights shots like panels of comic book art, and action director Poon Kin-kwan also aid him considerably.

Though the wires are visible in numerous shots, the wirework is well executed, particularly when Mo Han-wan and Li Chou-shui take to the sky for an epic super brawl, prefaced with the audience pleasing line, “Let’s fight in the sky!” Where Chin fails is in marrying a suitable music score to his kinetic visuals; too many of the gravity defying clashes are deadened by Violet Lam Man-yee’s murky compositions.

A testament to the cast is that they are not drowned out amid the sound and fury, and zealously enter the spirit of the project. Lin offers another dual role that seemed to be a contractual obligation at this point of her career, playing twin sisters, one saintly and the other decadent. Li Chou-shui, the more fun of the two, is given more screen time, but the film cannot decide whether she is evil, misunderstood or actually victimized.

Gong Li’s character is interesting but massively underdeveloped, leaving the actress to carry her scenes on beautiful charisma alone. Mo Han-wan is erotically attracted to Li Chong-hui, and her resulting feud with Li Chou-shui seems to be a result of this attraction as much as a struggle for power. Cheung Man’s Purple, with her wide-eyed innocence masking ruthless, but ultimately benign ambition is a welcome comic relief to the warring gods, and her chicanery is a comically-mischievous counterpoint to the more Machiavellian dealings of Ting, played by Norman Chu Siu-keung with the successful broad strokes evident in his Shaw Brothers performances. Frankie Lam has the thankless role of the dull Shaolin monk, but manages to inject some bumbling humor.

Ultimately, The Dragon Chronicles is a big-budget pantomime, with cartoon characters and the emphasis on spectacle over coherence. Chin thinks nothing of undercutting the climactic battle between Li, Mo and Ting by having Purple striking silly poses as she attempts to adopt one of the powerful stances. Compared to this, Tsui Hark’s Zu has the stately grace of A Touch of Zen, but with Hong Kong cinema rather anemic in recent times, this kind of cinematic adrenalin may again be what’s needed.