Once upon a Time in China 5 (1994)

I love the Once Upon A Time In China series but this one was just a mess. Tsui Hark  did return as the director to this movie but man this was not that good. Vincent Zhao is an underrated martial arts actor but they didn't use him for that here. Most of the time they just used guns to shoot each other and not martial arts but there is just too much guns in a martial arts film I didn't like that at all.

The story is kind of hard to understand. Its mostly Wong Fei Hung and his 4 students have to save the town from pirates.

The Cast looked good but wasn't used to its potential. I'm sure they could of thought of a different plot to do with this movie. The romance between Vincent Zhao and Rosamund Kwan has no chemistry. When your main actor Jet Li leaves the series and you continue it with a different actor that is a tough job. Vincent Zhao did fill in with the fight scenes but him to fill in for the romance part just didn't work out at all.

The Music was missing. The intros in the series are always good but in here it wasn't. It is Wong teaching his students martial arts but with a weird instrumental music. They barely used the Wong Fei Hung theme. The only good music in here was that they used the Jackie Chan version of singing the Once Upon A Time In China song at the end.

Re-watch: I don't recommend to rewatch it but sometimes I do for the laughter.

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To say that this movie was a mess was an understatement. Which was truly unfortunate, since the movie's plot of surrounding the aftermath of Beijing's fall and the clash with the pirates could've been a good one, but no, we had to be sidelined with the plot of the supposed love triangle between Feihung, Siu Kwan and Siu Kwan's younger sister.

After fleeing from Beijing and returning to Foshan, Feihung and his family returned towards an almost ghost town. Apparently, in the span of time of them being away (being involved with the first Lion King competition and the second one, as well as the fall of the Qing Dynasty), pirate activity started to become rampant. So despite the initial plan for them to head to Hong Kong after reuniting with the rest of the Poh Chi Lam people, Feihung and the others also had to deal with the pirates so as to return peace and safety to the people of Foshan.

I still disliked the whole plot involving the 14th Aunt (not calling her May because that wasn't her name, as it was derived from Siu Kwan calling her Mui which basically means 'younger sister'). Like, I get the appeal of trying to insert another girl in the plot to add some kind of tension that necessitates bringing back Rosamund Kwan as Siu Kwan, but honestly, the way they did it in this movie was not even amusing. But really, the comedic effect doesn't hit quite as well as when we had Jet Li and Kwan do the same shadow play in the previous movies. All because this time the movie relied too much on having Leung Foon create the source of conflict by creating a misunderstanding that Feihung kept chasing after every woman in sight - to which could've worked better had Zhou's Feihung never been shown to have any interest in 14th Aunt from movie 4 and this one. And I also can't really buy the sister's excuse of saying 'she tried not to fall for him' because in the last movie, she did do everything to look and behave exactly like Siu Kwan as if she did intend to get Feihung to like her. And really, the whole fight between the sisters was so unnecessary and very annoying.

That said, this movie brought back Ah Wing and Ah So, and I love the fact that as much as Ah So was shown to still not be good in Kung Fu... he turned out to be quite skilled with guns. Zhang Tielin returned to the franchise again... but this time playing a different character, and honestly, I wished the movie had focused more on the plight of the remaining constables instead of the stupid romance plot. Also, I had to question the fact that this movie seemed to forget that Feihung had been in charge of the local militia, which was the men that had been entrusted to him back in the first movie, which made the scene about them trying to restart the local militia from scratch a tad unbelievable, as if forgetting that the men that had joined PCL in the past were former soldiers, so why were those men missing? And where's the rest of PCL's students in Foshan?

The plot was so choppy, messy and badly compiled, which made this movie hard to bear. The sequence of them going to the pirate's hideout was cool, but due to the bad editing... felt very out of place. Despite how we're being told that the pirates were supposed to consist of multiple groups with different coloured flags, we end up just seeing one. That felt a bit underwhelming, especially when at the beginning they made it seem like the pirates were part of a very huge group... but personally, the Taiping gang had been a lot more convincing at being baddies than this. And seriously, who was it that thought having Vincent Zhou act like Feihung could flirt with girls without effort was a good idea? Like this might work with Jet Li, but Vincent really didn't have that much charisma to really pull that effect.

But hey, after so many years... I finally did actually watch this shitshow for real.

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