Once Upon a Time in China 3
Review
Format: VCD
Stars: Jet Li, Rosamund Kwan, Hung Yan Yan

If you're looking for martial arts, don't get this one. It's about lion dancing. That's the plot too. Won Fei Hung (Jet Li) enters a lion dancing competition for reasons having to do with the assassination attempt on the Emperor and also an oil company.

I bought this vcd thinking it was the martial arts one, but it's number 2 that has the main martial arts of the series. I was mad. But I still finished the movie, and although the first cd was a drag, it picked up a little on the second one. Sure, not much in the way of martial arts, but some of the lion dancing is good, and there are a few, very few, scenes with some wu shu. There's a character named Club Foot who joins the clan and he can do some great looking maneuvers with his legs.

The 3rd in this series isn't HALF as moody as the first. In fact, not moody at all. I felt almost no emotion until Aunt Yee and Fei Hung's relationship started to grow, but we didn't get to know what happened of that. The movie abruptly ended at the end of the last lion dancing competition, but there was a morale to the story and that is that when governing a state, one shouldn't put human lives ahead of the general welfare. That I liked, and actually scored some good points with me.

The martial arts content? There's hardly any. Wong Kei Ying has a fight in the beginning which is semi-impressive, he uses real moves, and moves pretty well for an old guy. Hung Yan Yan uses wires the whole time, and I can't imagine why they did this to him.



Yan Yan and Li have a potentially good fight, which is decent. Yan Yan is amazing, and again they put him on wires, but he does some good kicks without them. Not much else really. Li doesn't do much.



And Li gets into a fight in his own house while he's slipping around on wine which is on the ground. Lame. Basically he avoids axes, jumps on a guy's back, uses him to kick other guys, and that's it. Hung Yan Yan has a tiny fight outside, and the villian flies up onto the roof.



Basically the rest of the movie is Lion Dancing. It's not like it's done badly, but it's not my thing. If it's your thing, then yea go ahead and get it.



The vcd I bought was incredibly pixelated. The MPEG was so terribly compressed that I could clearly see the blocks, all the time. Like I said, hardly any mood settings, just some story.

Rating: 5/10 - Like I said, not too overwelmingly enjoyable. Had the morale and relationship not been in there, 2/10.

UPDATE 10/9 - Rating System Change

2/5 - Not a good addition to the series. Bits of martial arts, nothing that can satisfy.

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