Produced by Jackie Chan and titled "杨门女将之军令如山", this movie stars Cecilia Cheung as the lead character, Richie Ren, Liu Xiaoqing, Zheng Peipei, Kathy Chow and so on. The former was recently plagued with unfavourable and widespread news coverage of her high profile marriage collapse with Nicholas Tse. In fact, she is starting to look quite gaunt from her earlier movies. She showed off a lot of wide-eyed glares and crying onscreen but I wasn't convinced of the emotions displayed.
Overall, I found this movie rather lame, comical and in fact amateurish. I expected a lot more from this movie since I have seen some really good productions on such period dramas. There was quite a bit of gore where a few of the female yang warriors were killed off one after another in battle. The recent chinese movies that I watched seemed to get from bad to worse. I do not know if it was intentional, but there were frequent sniggers coming from the audience as they were also caught off guard by some of the funny scenes.
I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone. Instead, I prefer the 2001 Taiwanese tv version "Lady Warriors of the Yang Family" (杨门女将之女儿当自强) starring some of our local artistes and the more recent 2006 China tv serial "Young Warriors of the Yang Clan" (少年杨家将). Two links are attached below for reference:
- http://www.spcnet.tv/Taiwanese-TV-Series/Lady-Warriors-of-the-Yang-Family-review-r1665.html
- http://www.crunchyroll.com/library/Young_Warriors_of_the_Yang_Clan_2006
