Search - Four Dragons on DVD

Was almost good...

Low-Ranking Reviewer | US of A | 09/20/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Rented this and i must say i am almost as disappointed as the other lone reviewer. The film looks recent and looks great. Good cinematography, scenery, and locales and the fight choreography is pretty good. Sharp, fluid, fights with some nice kicks, stunt-work and some stylized scenes make for fairly exciting action.

However....

The dubbing is really bad and makes the movie seem extra bland and lifeless. The four dragons or heroes of the film come off as uninteresting. The story is straight-forward enough for the most part(rebellion and betrayal), but the dubbing i'm sure has dumbed down the characters and situations to the point where you probably won't care. There is a love sub-plot sort of, but that is short-changed too. There are a few good fight scenes, but one of them is repeated quite a bit(2 or 3 times), to the point where i had thought it accidentally skipped back to that chapter. The animated blood is odd too. Not sure if this was an added thing for the western release or if the Asian filmmakers actually put this in. And the betrayal part of the plot, as well as the ending of the film, is rather abrupt and leaves you thinking "that's it?!?"

Worth a rental at best as is. But honestly, if you never saw this, you wouldn't misss much but a few good fights scenes(a three-way fight in a cavern, a cage fight sequence, and the lengthy fight that repeats mentioned earlier). 2 1/2 rounded up to 3 cause i do think the fights and camera-work/visuals were good. Who knows, this might be a 4-star film in its original form, but the dubbing drags it to mediocre at best."

Avoid

XTREMEHORSEMAN | Denver | 09/12/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"First off amazon says this movie is from 1992 but it's actually a recent movie.To tell you the truth I cant even tell you the plot because it was to nonsensical for me to follow. Now considering this is a Kung Fu movie the plot doesn't really matter if the fight scenes are awesome but unfortunately they are below average and few and far between. It's not so much that the scenes are poorly choreagraghed as the over directing, IE zooming in and out and going fast the slow then fast again. But what was really annoying was the animated blood that would splatter across the screen during fight scenes. So overall avoid this and get one of the other 100s of Kung Fu movies that are far more entertaining."