Tried, but lame

Rating: Null/10 (17 April 2003)

I was disappointed by "Ying Xiong". Maybe it was over hyped. The "Rashomon" strategy and "Matrix" actions made the movie stale (give me a break.). The color coordination was, first I thought beautiful, but it becomes over-conscious and gets lousy along the story. The most unfortunate point is, there are pretty great and authentic Kong Fu actions through the entire movie, but frequent antigravity 20 yard jumps and Superman like levity on the water were enough to spoil the whole good scenes and made the movie totally absurd.
Although there are some philosophical moments that reflect director's attempts to make the movie deeper, some play at the serious scenes are over-exaggerated and simply made me laugh. The magnificence of emperor's palace and the overwhelming number of soldiers may indeed give you a good grasp of Chinese pre-history (and I will give a credit for this), but this story is NOT really historic at all as other reviewers said. There are bunch of other great Chinese movies that depict better and more accurate deal of Chinese (pre-)history. This movie is sadly superficial and pretentious, and I hope the Hong Kong movie market will not follow this.