Aside from watching Part 1 last week, Part 2 having been the continuation, was good up until the last half an hour of the film. In Part 1, the viewers could tell that the main character was the painter, Ku, and I believed King Hu made it very clear. The movie was the continuation of where we left off, which was the forest scene. The plot continues to flow as Ku, Yang, and the others form a plan in order to capture the Emperor and leads to an ambush, which I thought was rather clever. There were a few questions after the ambush, like why was Ku laughing as he was strolling to where all the attacks had happened and then as soon as he saw the Emperor killed, Ku automatically went into a state of shock as all the soldiers (?) around him were dead as well. I did not get that part because shouldn’t Ku have known that they all died as he was constantly laughing like a maniac?
As the story picks up from there, Ku then goes in search of Ms. Yang as she has ran away. As he searches for her and climbs a mountain, a new born baby suddenly appears. I had a couple questions after this scene. One, was Ku searching for Ms. Yang for a total of 9 months to a year and then the baby was born OR the baby just suddenly appeared in a couple of days/weeks that Ku was searching for Yang? Second, after Ku had found the baby, shouldn’t the film have ended there instead of moving on to a totally different story with different villains and different protagonists when the viewers were focusing on Ku as the protagonist this entire time?
After Ku escapes from becoming a “Wanted Man”, Yang suddenly appears with the General, the monk, and then you have another different character who is now another villain. The story then focuses on those set of characters and then Ku makes a slight cameo appearance at the end of the movie as he holds the baby and looks up into the sun. At that moment, I was lost and completely dumbfounded.
Although, I did like the first part of the film and majority of the second part as it kept me on my toes and had a lot of action, I did not like how it ended. The usage of props and amount of action in this film was pretty cool as it kept me entertained and the ambush scene was well plotted, however the storyline could have used a little more work as I felt like King Hu was dragging the story.
ACM 382: King Hu Film Reviews 