Sunday, January 19, 2025

A LEGEND, debuting on Digital, Blu-ray & DVD January 21


Billed as a sequel to the 2005 film THE MYTH, A LEGEND is really closer to a remake (though don't quote me it's been long enough since I saw THE MYTH that I could be overstating it) . The film is the story of a professor, played by Jackie Chan, finding some ancient relics that mirror ones in his dreams. His dreams tell the story of the battle between the Huns and the Hans and a beautiful woman tasked with keeping the land safe.

I know a lot of people are getting upset that they used AI  to make Jackie tat look younger, but the truth of the matter is that the film has a more serious problem and that is a wildly uneven script. Drifting erratically from grand action to soap opera and back again the film feels like it doesn't now what it want to be. The film feels like it is trying to make a point about the glory of China instead of being an entertaining action film.

I know I have been admonished by some of my friends for covering films from China owing to their crack down on artists and dissenters, but the truth is the Chinese government intervention in the making of films is going to do more damage faster simply because no one is going to want to see the films or the art produced. A LEGEND, like several recent other films from China, has the feel of a film that had the government crawling all over it, making it less enjoyable because the plot feels contrived and the film praises the glory of a mythical China that exists only in legend.

While the action is very good (if incredibly slick) I'm not sure it's quite up to the task of making the film  worth seeing. The problem is there is too much blah around it.

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