Fight choreography is still above par, and the costume designs are lavish and a treat to look at.
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Given that this is the third movie in the Detective Dee franchise, one would assume that Tsui Hark and crew would have refined the movie and its parts down to an exact science. Unfortunately, Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings (nope, not the teenybopper heartthrobs from the 90s) is a literally embodiment of being all over the place, and running an overlong 137 minutes really makes matters worse. What could have been a relatively simple plot is weighed down by literally dozens of plot threads, and the result is a mess of a film that gives short shrift to almost every subplot, which really defeats the purpose of setting up these narratives to begin with.
It really is quite a pity, as there are moments in Four Heavenly Kings that manage to stand out. Fight choreography is still above par, and the costume designs are lavish and a treat to look at. Mark Chao, who was a bit too smug (bordering on unlikeable) in his previous outing as Detective Dee, has mellowed in his performance and inches closer to Andy Lau’s still-superior performance in the first film. The film also chooses to focus less on Dee’s character and more on his compatriots Shatuo and Yuchi, though the lack of chemistry between the key players does diminish this move somewhat. Where the film truly falters, however, is in its copious use of mediocre CG, and in its final reel the CG is so dodgy that one wonders if the film had run out of budget during post.
While I appreciate a complex whodunit plot like any mystery fan would, the puzzle and eventual “solution” in Four Heavenly Kings is so unclear and convoluted that I actually gave up trying to figure anything out about halfway into the movie. Given that Tsui Hark had more than two hours to tell this tale, the lack of clarity is really an embarrassment. While the film sets up a fourth outing for its characters, it’s hard to imagine audiences staying enthused about the franchise in its current trajectory.
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