Saviour of the Soul

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Completely whacked movie that only fanciers of crazy films will appreciate

Saviour Of The Soul is a total mess, mixing messy elements and treatments and written in a most messy way. Well "written"...that's a big word and that's even pejorative for writers. Let's call it a big.....bog, which only the most accustomed to this kind of close encounters of the third kind will be able to escape from.

The atmosphere is as indefineable as elusive, in a blink of an eye, you jump from here to there, from now to then, from a gunfight to a sword duel or even to strange techniques between doping and taoïst magic (!). On top of that, the film strangely resembles City Hunter with Andy's dying best friend and associate who asks him to take care of his little sister who'll eventually become Andy's assistant...by the by, in the french subtitles of my old HK video tape, the girl is bluntly called Kaori...! You'd have understood it, except for the inventive and highly charged fights, and for the nice and "volunteer" actors, everything is second-rate and seems to come out of totally different movies : the sceneries are between cheap and boldly stinky ; quickly forgotten musics ; "stargate like" costumes and weapons (and that's mean for stargate...let's say just the first season), etc... However it is precisely that crust to place in one single movie so many components so diverse, which gives to the whole something daring and new, and there lies all the charm of the film.

Actors are good albeit placed in stereotyped roles. Aaron Kwok Fu-Sing's text is short enough to fill a single page only, and that's a relief. Kenny Bee Chan-To still doesn't appear long enough while Anita Mui Yim-Fong, a bit too much...Andy Lau Tak-Wah is clean all the way as long as he stays into a monolithic style like comedy, drama or even romance, but shows some real difficulties on "break points". These little suspended moments juste before a brutal rythmic fall through a big grimace or other trick came to cut an adverse emotion barely installed. It's not for a lack of entouthiasm though, on the contrary for it is the first film produced by Andy Lau by founding is owxn company : Teamwork Prod., and that is quite palpable in him.

In Brief, for those who already have some difficulties with the "holdall" side of Hong-Kong cinema, from Wong Jing's second-rate productions to Johnnie To's best movies, it is preferable to avoid that movie. On the other hand, for all the crazy completely whacked films lovers mixing themes, treatments, space and time (indeed...), go for it. Saviour Of The Soul is a "cinematic bobun" like only Hong-Kong knows how to makes us eat...a dish to enjoy by fancier only, however.