TheRetroCritic

Just when you thought the Star Wars franchise was well and truly done with prequels after the last three got so retroactively panned, here we have Rogue One: A Star Wars Story which takes place directly before Episode IV with a Han Solo prequel already in the works. Felicity Jones is Jyn, the daughter of research scientist Galen Orso (Mads Mikkelsen) who is one day taken by the Empire. Not sure whether her father is alive or dead, Jyn is rescued by a man called Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) and she eventually becomes a Rebel. When the Rebels find a message from Orso to Gerrera, they take Jyn to help deliver it but, with the Death Star being finally built and Imperial douchebag Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) on the Rebels' tail, this proves more difficult than anticipated. Soon enough, an unlikely team is assembled, their rogue mission being to steal the Death Star plans and deliver them to the right people. The team includes blind swordsman Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) and his p

Last week, Netflix released  Sword Of Destiny , a sequel to the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon . With Michelle Yeoh returning and Donnie Yen joining the cast, this looked like it had the potential to, at the very least, be entertaining. Co-produced by Harvey Weinstein, the film has been criticised for being too "Westernized" and seeing as the film's dialogs are spoken in English, cast members Jason Scott Lee, Harry Shum Jr and Natasha Liu Bordizzo are only partly Chinese and the whole thing is packed with CGI, I'd say that was a fair complaint. But the main problem with this sequel is it really bears little to no resemblance to the original both in terms of the story and the overall quality. Sure, there's mention of Chow Yun-Fat's Li Mu Bai (though the actor doesn't even cameo), Yeoh is present and the sword is once again a big deal but it's like Zhang Ziyi's entire character arc never happened, the flying sword fights are extrem

Having missed most of the Donnie Yen craze ( Ip Man and all that), I went into Dragon expecting something conventional, a typical martial-arts flick with a straight-forward plot and loads of floating and kicking. Dragon is most definitely not something conventional. It's also not about dragons. Instead, here we have Donnie Yen playing a rather dodgy character who is being investigated by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who's basically Sherlock Holmes in this. The story kicks off with Donnie Yen defending an old man from two machete-wielding robbers, he kicks their ass but without really doing anything and in the end, one of them is killed. Self-defence or not, Kaneshiro's sleuth doesn't buy Yen as a simple fisherman and starts to dig deeper and deeper into what actually happened, focusing on details, Yen's past etc. It's gripping stuff and it works as a Holmes mystery because you're really not sure where the movie is going for most of it, what's truth, wha