I tremendously enjoyed the 2012 movie "The Four" (aka "Si da ming bu"),so I was thrilled to get to sit down and watch "Lawless Kingdom" (aka "Si da ming bu 2"),the sequel to the entertaining 2012 movie.

It turned out that the sequel wasn't quite as good, and the reason for this was because of a very confusing character gallery. There is a heap of characters in the storyline, most of which you hardly get to form any relations to, and hardly even remember their names. And it just seemed a bit too chaotic and confusing to me. So that was definitely an anchor dragging the movie down.

The action and fighting sequences in this movie were good though, but mind you that you need to be a fan of the wire-fu martial arts movies to properly enjoy this, because they perform physical feats that are hardly nowhere near possible to perform.

They do have a good ensemble of casted actors and actresses, and it is great to see people return to reprise their characters from the 2012 "The Four" movie.

I sat through this entire movie, but I was only mildly entertained in comparison to the predecessor movie. A shame really, because it definitely had potential. And this second movie in the trilogy turned out to be as bland and mediocre as the third movie also is. Sad to say...

The second installment in a trilogy, if you've not seen the first film, you may struggle to get to grips with who the characters are but, given 20 minutes, you won't be worrying... actually, it may even make this more fun, since one wouldn't know of the visual treat to come.

What's good about The Four 2 is that, though it jumps straight into both the story and action, it doesn't leave gaps like the first one did or leave the viewer wondering what was the point in certain scenes; instead, it filters out minor players to make for a more compact viewing, and with the main plot events coming via the actions of characters introduced in this film, it works almost perfectly as a stand-alone product.

With a plot designed to intrigue the viewer as to whom is lying and about what, it's difficult to reveal much, but it was novel to see such tools introduced into a sequel, as in-fighting amongst team members would have come far more naturally than the forced time-fillers that took part in The Avengers or the awful dog "joke" that cued the bout in the Part I.

There have been some who complained that the ending was just a set-up for the third part, but really, it isn't - all questions are answered and had I not known that there was a Part III to come, it wouldn't have ruined the ride for me in any way.

Enjoyable.

like a lot of planned trilogy's it suffers because it doesn't conclude the story so you might want to wait until part 3 is released before watching The Four .. however both part 1 and part 2 were very well made a lot of cgi flying and wire-fu but some interesting characters and a few good fight scenes(more in part1 than part2 though) and some very good cinematography at times,what i loved most was how they were prepared to really let loose with the magic/fantasy aspects of the story western cinema just doesn't seem to get how to do that even in the big budget fantasy films that Hollywood produces... another excellent part of the production was the score and the musical direction it was very impressive...i really need to see part 3 now