This review may contain spoilers
Hard to Be Righteous, but Easy to Be Evil...
Ekin Cheng and Aaron Kwok returned as the characters they made famous a decade earlier in Storm Riders. Wind and Cloud were an unbeatable team who kept the bad guys at bay until The Evil Lord Godless and his son Heartless with their Japanese army kidnapped the emperor and searched for the treasure within the Dragon Tomb.I enjoyed The Storm Riders (1998). It was cheesy and the CGI was rudimentary, but the story was coherent and the action fun. The Storm Warriors (2009) took itself way too seriously and replaced storyline with endless slow-mo action scenes. Dialogue and character development were kept to a bare minimum. If you haven't watched the first one it may not matter because the atmospheric boys were hard to distinguish with the poor writing for them.
Simon Yam as The Evil Lord Godless seemed invincible and pretty soon it was just Wind and Cloud left to fight him and save China. They didn't have long for a super charged training montage so that they could take their revenge on the over-compensating dressed warlord. Wind went to Lord Wicked and took the, well, wicked route via an evil mud bath while Cloud went the righteous way and was trained by the wounded Nameless at the same time. Before you could say Buckets O' Blood, super slow motion, comic book style fighting with plenty of dismemberments and red goo flying through the air, took place and Cloud had to try and bring Wind back to the good side.
The story was frightfully thin and convoluted. Shu Qi knew what she was doing when she passed on the sequel and left her role to Tiffany Tang. The movie could have easily been 20 minutes shorter if the fights had been shot at regular speed. By the last twenty minutes I didn't really care about the consequences or who lived or died I just wanted it to end. A few of the fights were beautifully shot and the CGI was better than the first movie, but they dragged on at a glacial speed. When CGI replaces actual story and character development I lose interest quickly. During one of the overcooked fight scenes I really thought one of them might yell out, "Kamehameha!"
The Storm Warriors had a cast I was very excited about but they were criminally underused. Ekin and Aaron had grown as actors since the time Storm Riders was filmed but it was irrelevant as most of the time they were filming fight scenes in overly dramatic slow motion. They certainly didn't have to worry about learning many lines. Simon Yam was at least properly menacing as an undefeatable warlord, a nifty trick given how little time he had on screen. Nicholas Tse as Heartless had little to do except look pretty and scowl. Charlene Choi as Dream had little to do but look pretty and worried for her few scenes. Even for comic book characters the lot of them were mostly lifeless. Ultimately, I didn't care about any of them.
The OST was nice if melodramatic at times. As with many of the movies in this genre, the costume department used a lot of leather, gold lame, and metal looking armor. There was no shortage of wind machines as Ekin and Aaron had their long layered mom hairdos seemingly always flowing in the wind.
If you enjoyed The Storm Riders, don't get your hopes too high for this sequel. Several storylines were left dangling, completely forgotten. Maybe I am truly the Heartless one because I actually laughed during the last scene which I'm sure was so supposed to be emotional but came across as absurd to me. As one of my favorite TV baking judges would say, The Storm Warriors was style over substance. It might have looked good, but it didn't taste very well going down.
8/24/22
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