Tai Chi Zero

Tai Chi Zero really only exists to set up Tai Chi Hero. It looks amazing, but it's super cheesy.

I saw a trailer for Tai Chi Hero, and it looked cool, so I decided to check out the prequel before I saw it. I read on IMDb that Hero was better than Zero, so I wasn't expecting much. The whole kitschy/cheesy/video game feel was kind of obnoxious. It wasn't my thing. I didn't like the pop-ups about the style, or the diagrams that showed up under people's feet. And I especially didn't like the part where it would say "That's Angelababy as Chen Yu Niang! She's a famous actress!" It really took you out of the movie, and I don't know who those actors are, anyway.

I loved that Claire was wearing a man's outfit. That was really interesting. The actual wushu style was pretty cool. The movie as a whole looked amazing. It was gorgeous. I would watch a movie done in the same style about paint drying. The fight scenes when the grandmaster finally started fighting were really cool, too. 

This movie had a lot more plot than Hansel & Gretel. It was still simple, but it worked really well. I was actually even confused by the whole laborer/grandmaster thing. I was like "wait a minute, but the laborer is an outsider, how can he be the grandmaster?" I guess maybe he married in like Yang's going to. Speaking of which, that was a huge step for her to marry him just so he wouldn't be killed. Marriage was pretty much forever back then.

I don't really trust the grandmaster. It wasn't very nice of him to use Yang like that, to get him to destroy the machine and then not have any plans of teaching him their kung fu. I like how they gave Wimpy more motivation for destroying the town than just money. It was really good back story that he was bullied and never fully accepted in, and then Claire died, so that's another layer. I like that they gave him some character with the markings from the gravel, too. I'm really excited to see the next one, especially since it looks like Peter Stormare's going to have a big part in it.

The rock music for the fight scenes at the beginning didn't work for me. I feel like the movie as a whole really didn't get going until the grandmaster started fighting, and by then it was almost over, so that's a pretty short amount of time. I didn't really like the little girl. I guess kids in martial arts movies just aren't my thing. I should probably stay away from The Karate Kid. The wirework was a little too obvious. Sometimes I could practically see the wires; you could tell they had been used, even though you couldn't actually see them.