I definitely expected this to be weaker, more superficial and more action-obsessed than the original just judging by its trailer, but it was actually worse in many more ways than I had thought of.
First ugly thing that hits you is the ruined color gamut, with all colors squeezed into two narrow bands around red and green (like the "teal and orange" madness that has gripped Hollywood this past decade, but shifted to the side toward red and green). Why must you do this to our eyes, movie studios, why? What have we done to deserve this? What's next, having to buy premium versions of the movie just to get the rest of the color spectrum?
Next comes the complete lack of originality of whatever crumbs of a story there are in there, the entirely boring and soulless dialogue, the cardboard-thin characters that couldn't make you care about them if their lives depended on it, and ending with the mediocre fight scenes. The whole thing was centered around the fighting and they couldn't even get that part at the level of grace and artistry and impact of the fights in the original film.
And to top it all off, they reversed the languages and wrote the original dialogue in English and added Chinese as a dub. This isn't catastrophic - at least the dub is there so you can make the experience reasonably similar to the original -, but it's still somewhat annoying and a bad production choice.
This was a very poor use of Yeoh's potential. All in all, my favourite character ended up being the girl fighter from the villain's crew, who just did her job and did it well, without wasting our time with too much meaningless dialogue or with any other hopeless attempts at gaining a depth the screenwriters never gave her in the first place.
First ugly thing that hits you is the ruined color gamut, with all colors squeezed into two narrow bands around red and green (like the "teal and orange" madness that has gripped Hollywood this past decade, but shifted to the side toward red and green). Why must you do this to our eyes, movie studios, why? What have we done to deserve this? What's next, having to buy premium versions of the movie just to get the rest of the color spectrum?
Next comes the complete lack of originality of whatever crumbs of a story there are in there, the entirely boring and soulless dialogue, the cardboard-thin characters that couldn't make you care about them if their lives depended on it, and ending with the mediocre fight scenes. The whole thing was centered around the fighting and they couldn't even get that part at the level of grace and artistry and impact of the fights in the original film.
And to top it all off, they reversed the languages and wrote the original dialogue in English and added Chinese as a dub. This isn't catastrophic - at least the dub is there so you can make the experience reasonably similar to the original -, but it's still somewhat annoying and a bad production choice.
This was a very poor use of Yeoh's potential. All in all, my favourite character ended up being the girl fighter from the villain's crew, who just did her job and did it well, without wasting our time with too much meaningless dialogue or with any other hopeless attempts at gaining a depth the screenwriters never gave her in the first place.