Blown away by how much I enjoyed this. Beautiful photography in incredible locations with lush colors, and the truly, deeply weird Marvel cosmic mythology that I love so much on full display. Being mostly divorced of the rest of the MCU is an even bigger benefit to this than I expected it to be. I just had such a good time watching this weird-ass sci-fi fantasy movie.
The big thing holding this back are the characters themselves. They don’t give…
Lustig is a great director of $10 movies. The ending of this just outstanding and I have to assume is a major part of this movie’s legacy. It’s meandering and occasionally boring, but Spinell is terrific and gets to do so many different kinds of things in one movie that it’s fun to watch no matter what we’re actually doing in the plot.
“Did America make you soft?”
The first 40 minutes were so strong, and full of such great Bill Pope photography, that I’m giving this one a pass. You get a romantic wuxia fight, a Jackie Chan bus fight, and a Shaw Bros temple training sequence back-to-back-to-back and I had a huge smile on my face.
Then it takes a steep nosedive into the basic-bitch Marvel formula complete with fully CGI action scenes, history by way of museum display exposition dumps,…
