The Sorcerer and the White Snake review

THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE:

IT’S PAN’S LABYRINTH MEETS CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, MINUS THE FUN! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: F (1 ½ stars)  

MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Jet Li and Raymond Lam Fung battling in The Sorcerer and the White Snake

            Let me make this perfectly clear, I don’t hate foreign Martial Arts movies from China, on the contrary, I love them, films like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, and Kung Fu Hustle. They are filled with exciting action, strong plot structure, and decent character development.

            Then, there’s The Sorcerer and the White Snake and while the special effects look impressive at times (and I do mean “at times”) and some of the action is fun, the film’s plot is incredibly confusing and hard to follow, the acting is a bit hokey, and a lot of the characters are bland.

            I’m not against movies with confusing and complex plots, I enjoyed films like Memento and Inception, the plots are very complex but they also had strong writing, acting, and visuals. The writing in this movie on the other hand is mediocre and often laughable, which can make it very hard to follow what is going on.

            The film is about an herbalist who falls in love with a thousand year old White Snake, disguised as a woman (Eva Huang), I know weird right? Jet Li stars as a sorcerer named Abott Fahai, who discovers the woman’s identity and battles to save the herbalist’s soul.

            Overall, The Sorcerer and the White Snake didn’t really do it for me, it’s not the worst film I’ve ever seen, believe me I’ve seen worse, but it was very underwhelming. While some of the special effects and action scenes look impressive, other times it looks like crappy CG effects, especially on the snakes, they look like something out of a Stephen King mini-series or Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

            I know what you’re probably asking, are there any things about the film that I like? Well, aside from most of the cast, Jet Li does a decent job portraying the sorcerer and the music score is nice, however there is one scene in particular that has a song playing that seems completely out of place.

            I want to like this movie, I really do, it has some impressive effects and interesting concepts that remind me of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Pan’s Labyrinth, but it can’t save the film’s mediocre writing, acting, and poor CG animation effects on the creatures. If you’re interested in watching it, give it a rent and share your own opinion, though I would prefer watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon instead.