Toothless new ‘Tiger’ is a pointless sequel
More than 15 years ago, Ang Lee’s glorious and beautiful martial arts epic “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” became a worldwide sensation, grossing more than $200 million and winning the Academy Award for best foreign language film as well as three other Oscars.
I thought it also should have won best picture over “Gladiator,” and the years have only served to solidify that feeling. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was one of my favorite films of the decade.
That said, and even though “Crouching Tiger” was based on the fourth novel of a five-part series, which meant there was plenty of literary material left unexplored cinematically, I never felt a yearning for a continuation of the story, or a prequel or two.
Some movies seem pretty much perfect on their own.
But now we have a Netflix sequel, and while it’s wonderful to see Michelle Yeoh return as Yu Shu-Lien and there are a few moments of soaring majesty, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny” is an unnecessary and underwhelming experience that plays like a B-movie knockoff/follow-up of the original.
We pick up the story some 18 years after the original. (This puts us in the late 18th century.)
Yeoh’s Yu Shu-Lien, the legendary philosopher and teacher and warrior, returns to Peking to pay respects to Sir Te, a character from the original film who has recently passed. (For reasons I won’t reveal in case you haven’t seen the first “Crouching Tiger” and you want to check it out, the characters played by Chow Yun-fat and Zhang Ziyi are absent from this film. Both actors and characters are sorely missed.)
The snarling villain Hades Dai (Jason Scott Lee) takes this opportunity to send the gifted but hubris-filled young martial artist Wei Fang (Harry Shum Jr.) into Sir Te’s compound to steal the Green Destiny, a legendary and much sought-after sword.
Wei Fung is captured. Meanwhile, Yu Shu-Lien begins mentoring young fighter Snow Vase, played by the lovely Natasha Liu Bordizzo— often training her in front of the caged Wei Fang, the better for him to heckle Snow Vase and flirt with her.
Still with me? Good, because I’m not even sure I’m still with me. In between some decent fight sequences and plenty of sweeping shots meant to be majestic but quite obviously done with mid-level CGI, “Sword of Destiny” gets bogged down in all sorts of plot machinations, punctuated by words of wisdom such as, “A thousand broken sticks and swords won’t teach you as much as one that bends to your will,” and, “[Those are] big words for a little man.”
The actors speak English, giving “Sword of Destiny” a 1970s B-movie vibe. A hint of romance between Yu Shu-Lien and a former love interest seems like a forced plot point.
Director Yuen Wo-Ping is a legendary martial arts choreographer with a track record that dates back to “Drunken Master” (1978), the film that made Jackie Chan a star, and includes the original “Crouching Tiger,” the “Matrix” trilogy and the “Kill Bill” movies. He delivers some nifty fight sequences, most notably a battle that takes place on a frozen lake, complete with overhead shots of twirling combatants sliding on the ice, which begins to crackle and break.
If “Crouching Tiger” didn’t exist and Netflix had made “Sword of Destiny” as a standalone original, it might play a little better ...
Nah. It still would have come across as a competent, secondtier martial arts flick.