More Thought on an Overrated Movie

Rating: 3/10 (27 February 2001)

I am starting to feel like Elaine in the Seinfeld episode where she
was the only one who hated The English Patient.

I wanted to add so additional thoughts to my previous comments:
People cannot fly and no amount of martial arts training can make that happen. If the movie was supposed to be a fantasy then this should have been stated up front.
Anyone that has sparred with an opponent hard for at least a minute will get winded. No amount of training can change this. In the movie people are shown running and fighting at breakneck speeds without even cracking a sweat.
People compare the fight scenes to The Matrix. Well The Matrix had the idea that all of life was a computer simulation. Thus the stunt that occurred were feasible. As I stated before "People cannot fly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Getting to choreography, most fights are not pretty to watch. Anyone who has seen the Ultimate Fighting Championship or any no-holds barred fighting event will attest to this. However, for a movie fights have to be well choreographed to make it "artistic" and exciting. I will grant that. Given that, a choreographed "real fight" would look more like something out of a Chuck Norris or Jean Claude Van Damme film where fighters throw blows when they have openings and do not fight to an almost musical rhythem.
Nobody and I repeat nobody can become a martial arts "master" from reading a manual. The skill comes from years of training and hard work from a skilled teacher.
As I stated before the plot of this movie was so convoluted and boring. The desert sequence seemed to be thrown in the middle to get some nice shots of the desert in the film. This sequence totally breaks up the flow of the movie.
There used to be Kung Fu movies that aired in New York on Saturday afternoons. These were very low budget and usually had plots like:
1. The Magnificent Seven, where a group of bandits terrorizes a town and a bunch of Kung Fu guys get together to fight them
2. A relative or teacher is murdered. The student or relative of the deceased then trains and goes to seek revenge.
3. Some yo yo character begs to be trained by the Shaolin priests in Kung Fu (the Karate Kid had a similar theme) so he can go fight the bullies that have been picking on him.
Anyone of the above had a more interesting plot than CTHD. In most of the above movies the only "flying" we ever see is someone leaping very high to get into a tree or a high ledge. This is done by running the camera backwards. There is never the floating and walking across water that is shown in CTHD. Each time this effect was done in CTHD I could see the characters shoulders hunched up or their clothing on their shoulder moved up like they were being picked up by strings.
I can go on and on and shoot down any argument from these couch potato (ex. Roger Ebert) movie critics who don't have a clue what it takes to be a true martial artist and who have never been in a real brawl.