Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon has some gorgeous settings, a fairly interesting plot, and likeable characters, but the atrocious CGI and bizarrely unrealistic action sequences are a little distracting.

The first Detective Dee movie was pretty disappointing, but I only watched it in the first place because this one looked interesting, so I was hoping it would be better. It was better, but not amazing or anything. I felt like the first one was a little hard to follow; this one was less confusing. The Empress' headdresses were supposed to be a big deal in the first one, but I feel like they were more impressive in this one. Dee didn't seem to do much "detecting" to me in the first one, and I think they did a better job of that with this one, too. This one is actually ranked slightly lower than Phantom Flame on IMDb, so I guess they don't agree with me.

The CGI was horrid in this one. It looked like a video game. It was tough to reconcile it with the live action stuff going on. The stunts were also pretty ridiculous; more like a cartoon than live action. There were some really beautiful shots of some of the sets, though. The scene at the dye shop with all the fabric was cool, although it took me a while to figure out why there was all that fabric hanging up; at first it seemed like they were just doing it to have an interesting set.

I thought Angelababy was in the first one; I must've been getting that mixed up with the Tai Chi Hero series. I was really confused about how Yin Ruiji got to the position she had in Phantom Flame, and why it didn't seem like Dee recognized her in that one. But it turns out Yin Ruiji wasn't in Phantom Flame, Shangguan Jing'er was, so now it makes sense.

Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame is visually interesting, but the story is somewhat confusing and the action falls flat.

I saw a trailer for Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon that looked cool, so I requested it from the library. When it came in, I checked IMDb to see if it was any good or not, and I found out it was actually a prequel. I figured I had better watch the original one first. I love the  Huayi Brothers movies. They're always so gorgeous. The costumes in this movie were great. The sets were beautiful; I loved the use of different colors of light. It was cool how the eyes of the Buddha looked out over the city; it was such an interesting shape to look out of.

The action was confusing, though. I had no idea what was going on half the time. I think I'd like to see fewer movies choreographed by Sammo Hung. It just gets boring when you can't follow what's going on. I had a hard time following the characters and the plot, too. I could've used some of the pop-on character names from the Tai Chi movies here.