I don't get it (spoiler)

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2001)

To prepare for seeing this I watched a battery of Hong Kong movies, including three dozen flying-swordfight movies, to enable me to put it into perspective. The upshot was, I became a fan of Hong Kong movies, but didn't like this one at all. The only pleasure it gave me was to watch the younger woman in her fight scenes--what the movie let me see of them. She's so stylish and intense that alone of the stars she's able from time to time to struggle out of the blanket of dullness that smothers everything else. This must be one of the most uncinematic tellings of a story in the history of movies. Without the sound or the subtitles, you couldn't follow the plot at all.
Actually I didn't understand it even with the titles. The most I could get was that it centers on a pair of ex-swords-for-hire, male and female, who have been sniffing around each other for years but are both too shy to make anything of it, like the neighbors in "The Cherry Orchard." Their retirement is accidentally ended by their constant run-ins with an insufferable girl who wants to be a fighter like them but keeps getting into trouble from which they have to bail her out. Her potential has been misdirected by her secret master (female master: mistress?), an enemy of good guys in general and the male s-f-h in particular. In the final rescue, he and his opposite number finally declare their love, but too late, and the girl, realizing at last the sorrow of it all,............does what? Kill herself? Accept her fate? Fly away? It doesn't matter much which, and the same is true of almost every act in the movie. Who are these people? What are they doing? Why should we care?