Hong Kong takes on the traditional Chinese wuxia genre in a garish format that seems to blend aspects of Western blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and Sherlock Holmes. Sloppy editing and weak visual effects sometimes detract from a story which is nonetheless fast-paced and entertaining. The result is blockbuster material in its own right, though not a particularly memorable or special one. It's hardly on the level of Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou or even John Woo, whose efforts have all impressed more.

The plot is sometimes bogged down in attempts to be surprising and seemingly inconsistent character motivations, though by the end it ties together enough that you'll probably just be left underwhelmed rather than confused. It's a spooky pandemonium. In a nutshell it's wuxia Sherlock Holmes, with less charm and more silliness (in both the so-bad-it's-good sense and the just-plain-bad sense). At times feels like it's going to come together into something cool, but ultimately it never really does.

While this movie can be campy fun, it lacks the attention to art direction and choreography that add spice to a film like this. Given that characters have such illustrious titles as "Donkey Wang", I don't know why people expected legitimate character development to begin with.

The story is absolute nonsense, the visuals too CGI-enchanced and the performances flimsy, but this murder mystery/martial arts blockbuster is still surprisingly a lot of fun, even if only for how crazy it gets. The movie also has the best "man valiantly fighting a bunch of deer" scene of the year, in case you're into that.

A bit dull and silly but watchable if you don't expect something great

As suggested by the title this is has a mystery at the heart of the story--with some martial arts fight sequences filling in. Personally, I had trouble following the mystery plot and at some point I just didn't care; nor did I care much about the characters. I suspect some martial arts fans will like the fight sequences, but I didn't care for them as they were a bit too frenetic. (Note: Criticker predicted a score of 64!)

It has some interesting ideas and beautiful cinematography, but the plotline and character-development is horrible. Everyones motives keep on changing during the film which makes it all quite difficult to follow. Also it's lacking a true villain, so the hopscotch grand ending is bit stupid.