Once in a while you stumble upon a movie in which everything is great and you cannot wait for the next act or scene to unfold. Unfortunately this movie is not it. It is just one garbled mix up of different story lines, ideas and characters where nothing really has focus. The only thing I will remember from this, is Jacky Chan's vegetable fry and noodle fight scenes. Highly original, but hopelessly out of place.

Melodrama and mediocre score aside, what this has in abundance is some excellent choreography. Lau is great here and Chan is always entertaining (although his character apparently matters so little, he doesn't even have a name), but I felt he just needed a lot more screen time, he's not even in the first half of the flick.

Nice to look at, but laughably stupid. Each predictable, melodramatic moment had me cringing.

"Benny Chan's kung-fu film Shaolin both benefits from and is ultimately defeated by its own epic ambitions." - Andrew Schenker

The melodramatized accounts are dragging the film down a bit (one may choose to skip through them without missing much). Everything Shaolin is gold. True to it's ancestors (I haven't watched the Jet Li's debut original)

carries message to certain people

Philosophical monks and lethal fights don't mix well enough.

Starts decent, but by the end the problems with continuity, editing and acting really show through. Highlight is Jackie Chan's one fight scene, really great! Shame he didn't have more of a role in the film, and also a shame that his character was completely irrelevant to the plot- basically tacked on as an afterthought. Anyway thumbs up for the fight choreography throughout the film, which remains head and shoulders above the fight scenes coming out of the Hollywood studios lately.