This movie is a lot of fun. The story is simple but the martial arts presented is really worth seeing. A crew of masters was teamed up for this hit. And there is also this wonderful woman dancing at He Sao's birthday party - fantastic! Different than in his recent roles, where he is just keeping quite and looking cool all the time (which he does), Jet Li is allowed to show his talent as a actor in this film. His performance is very good. He brings this movie to life. The Kung Fu performances are (mostly) realistic and people who practice Kung Fu will tend to try some of the movements. They show different takes from the mantis.

Out of the 20 or so Jet Li movies I've seen this, in my opinion,is his best. Many people may disagree with me, but I think it was fantastic. Jet Li did a great job directing for his first time and the fight scenes are great!

The plot is very basic. Jet plays a Chinese soldier returning home from the war. When he arrives home he meets up with his uncle and realizes everything has changed. The Americans there control everything with power and money. Jet eventually gets involved when the Captain of the sailors hits him with his car and things start from there. Jet has many battles with the sailors at the bar-boxing ring.

There is about 8 fight scenes in total, some are short and some are really long. All of the one-on-one fight scenes involve Jet fighting an American sailor. There is also a really good brawl room brawl after Jet fights the captain of the sailors for one of many times in the boxing ring at the bar. The fight scenes are boxing and Kickboxing scenes with Hong Kong style choreography. They are really good and resemble some of Cory Yuen's later work. Jet Li does throw in some traditional Kung Fu though, like his fighting stance he uses. The ending fight is great where Jet takes out each sailor one-on-one untill only the captain remains in the factory. The final fight is really fast paced and keeps you wanting more. Jet Li shows us a future trademark by using a chain in a Wu Shu type technique(such as the belt in Fist of Legend, the fire hose in Romeo must die, the rope in My father is a Hero a.k.a the Enforcer,etc.) They also start playing this cool music that you would hear in a movie like Rocky. So I suggest you buy this movie if you have the chance!

This was Jet Li's second movie and was once again a Mainland Chinese production. The tone is on the opposite end of Shaolin Temple's: light-hearted and fun. The movie tells the story of two families on different sides of a river: Yu Hai's family of Shaolin martial arts'trained boys(one of whom is Jet Li) and another guy's family of Wudang (Wu Tang) swordsmanship-trained girls. There's been a rivalry between the families and that's interfering with the wedding between various members of the families who love each other. Also, there are some vicious bandits who want revenge after Yu Hai rescued the boys and injured their leader.

The cast is made up of authentic wushu stylists, and it shows. Everyone knows how to fight in this movie. The little girls, the little boys, the men, the women, the thieves, etc. Therefore, all the action is pure, authentic Chinese martial arts (pole, sword, 3-sectional staff, etc). The choreography is a lot different than people today are used to. However, if you like your fighting w/o extensive use of wire and special FX, this is definitely worth checking out. My only gripe is that Jet Li has to compete with the rest of the cast in showing off his skills.

The main flaw of this film is that although everyone in the cast are martial artists, the ensemble casting and numerous sub-plots take away from character development and not every subplot gets to be developed. The story jumps from one character's story to the next, and therefore not everyone gets to be fully developed.

I must say that the story and the children made the film more endearing. Jet Li is probably at his most likable (he's up there with his performance in Fong Sai Yuk). The little children are pretty enjoyable little scamps, just don't go into the film expecting a dead-serious martial arts movie. It's light-hearted and fancy free.