16 years after the first movie, the magical Green Destiny (a sword so powerful, anyone who wields it cannot be beaten) must be protected from an evil warlord Hades Dai. Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) travels to Peking to keep the sword safe. However, a member of Dai's cult, the West Lotus, attempts to steal it, but is captured instead. Lien assumes that Wei Fang (the West Lotus) will be rescued and more will attempt to steal Green Destiny. So, she calls for the aid of noble warriors to help her. Silent Wolf (Donnie Yen) and several other dashing warriors travel to Peking. Once there, they are attacked by West Lotus members and two warriors are killed. After the battle, Lien decides to move the sword somewhere else, but before she can do so, it is stolen by Wei Fang. However, after learning about his mother, he decides to fight Hades, and the rest of the warriors come to his aid. Silent Wolf battles Hades and wins. The rest of the surviving warriors head to Wudang to keep the sword there.
Yeah, I know I normally start with the good, but sadly this movie made me do this. So, we have an all Asian cast, set in an Asian background. How come they speak English? The original was in Mandarin, so how come no one speaks it? I feel like this movie is insulting my intelligence, honestly. It's like they figured, "Hey a bunch of Americans are going to see this, so make them speak American. It's not like they're going to notice the difference." Well, imaginary executive at Netflix, I noticed. Now, the quality of the movie. Some parts are visually stunning, other parts feel like it's a video game. Around the third act the quality drops and it gets more video gamey. There's an ice skating kung fu fight...which is just as sad as it sounds. The actors don't seem very motivated in the movie at all and most seem tired or bored. The line delivery sounds robotic at times and it's hard to get invested into our heroes. As mentioned before, act 3 gets worse. The fights look silly, the backgrounds look fake, and you don't feel any tension. You just want it to be over and that's always a bad thing. And, I should mention, this movie was filmed in Middle Ear-I mean New Zealand. The same place the Lord of the Rings movies were shot. At times it even feels like a LOTR movie. Silent Wolf and others are introduced like The Fellowship "And my axe!". C'mon guys. I could go on with the problems with this movie and it'd be about 40 pages long, so let's get to the good.
The Good:
There are some decent fight scenes in this movie. There's even an interesting training scene where Lien trains Snow Vase (a minor character, you wonder why they bothered putting a story in for her) how to be a better swordswoman. It's pretty good. The music is amazing to listen to as well.
Overall:
I feel cheated, really. This movie could have been great if they hadn't followed basic movie tropes and tried harder to make the story better. Not to mention insulting our intelligence by making native Chinese speakers speak English. Ouch guys. The use of CGI is a nice tool, but like most movies now, they used it more as a tool and it shows, especially towards the end. CTHD:SOD is a let down. I don't even recommend anyone watching this train wreck.
Rating: 1 Hidden Dragons out of 5.
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