The most telling moment. It's nearly an hour into the film, and somewhere in the middle of this incoherent plot Jackie Chan actually slides down a pipe and does a Jackie Chan thing and beats up three assassins. It's like he went nearly a whole movie without doing typical Jackie Chan stuff, and he just couldn't help himself.

I'd like to say this wasn't plot relevant, but that would work on the dubious assumption this film had a plot.

It talks about the fall of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty, and frankly, we already did that movie. It was called "The Last Emperor", and it was a vastly better film. This one seems to revel in re-enactments of battles, but doesn't really flesh out the characters too much. The annoying flash cards explaining events and characters (many of whom weren't necessary, really) was really more of a distraction.

I think this film is probably more interesting to Chinese Audiences, but I didn't give a darn about any of the characters or how this was going to all turn out. They end the movie on a happy note before Civil and world war and Communist dictatorship. WHich is kind of like Ending Titanic before they hit the Iceberg.

I'm going to give it a 2 for period costumes and props.

The movie starts with a failed battle in the Revolution. The reasons why the Qing dynasty is being deposed is not mentioned until later in the story and then only in abstract fashion. Much of the movie concentrates on overseas Chinese money funding the revolution as well as the attempts to stop foreign investors from loaning money to the Qing dynasty. This gives you a behind the scenes look at a revolution.

The movie was littered with patriotic slogans and noble causes to the point it interfered with the smoothness of the production as a historical piece into a modern Chinese patriot production. The message of the revolution is of self sacrifice for the good of the nation and don't forget to keep sending those dollars back home. I felt lost a few times during the film and that the producers of the movie had less historical integrity than an Oliver Stone film. The attempt to make heroes out of everyone who participated in the revolution was over done. I kept waiting for them to cut off the emperor's head and parade it through the streets and then I got really disappointed. Seems the Chinese are not French. I could never relate to the characters.

Every 5 minutes or so, you will get a subtitle pop up (and I'm not talking about the subtitles you have going if you're not fluent in Chinese btw.). And it will either be about some historical occurrence or another character that is being introduced. You have to ask yourself if this fact might annoy you a bit (or a lot). One thing is for sure, the story itself is intriguing.

The action scenes are also shot very nicely, the acting is pretty solid and you get a bit of what went down back then in China (more or less that is). It's strange though, because while the situation itself is gripping, the movie itself never really builds that much tension, that it completely grabs you. Didn't work for me at least. Shame because there is quite a lot of potential here ...