TheRetroCritic

After the success of Once Upon A Time In China , it was time for Jet Li to set aside his serious face for a bit and try something a tad lighter. The Wong Fei-hung films are great, don't get me wrong, but the tone throughout these movies is all-over-the-place, so much so that whenever it does attempt to lighten things up a bit that tends to come off as a bit distracting. The Legend does have its weird tone-shifts but they work well as a whole. Jet Li's Fong Sai-Yuk is much less of a flawless superhero than Fei-hung, he's a mischievous kid who happens to be good at martial arts due to his mother being a true badass. Yes, his mother. It's not everyday that a film's hero is upstaged by his mommy but Josephine Siao is so good she actually steals the show rather effortlessly. At first it's all a bit dodgy with her and her son having to take a beating from Kong Chu's father in order to keep his reputation as the strong head of the family intact but later

Wong Kar Wai's eclectic style is at its sharpest here in this beautifully crafted, quirky, hypnotic, heartbreaking little story of loneliness in Hong Kong. Two different but thematically close stories are told, one with Tony Leung and Faye Wong, the other with Takeshi Kaneshiro and Brigitte Lin. Both stories follow lost souls trying to beat their loneliness and let go of the past but the dynamic of each tale is very different. The first story is a bit darker with Brigitte Lin's blonde "femme fatale" being involved in drug smuggling, kidnapping and...murder. It's more of a thriller, really. The second part is much lighter and really sticks to its French New Wave-style rom-com feel. The cast is one of the best you'll find in any Hong Kong film: Lin displays a cold, piercing exterior but suggests she's more sensitive than she lets on. Kaneshiro is the heartbroken, kinda naive, nice guy you find in a lot of Wong Kar Wai films (see Tony Leung in Happy Toge