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wujie
Reviews
Jadesoturi (2006)
not bad but the complicated structure may easily confuse watchers
I should first of all say that it is very interesting for a Chinese to see how Finnish and Chinese mythologies (including the Chinese Buddhist idea of reincarnation) are sewed together and the resulting story does not make so bad a sense. In general I won't rate it low.
However, the structure of the film is quite annoying. The interleaving of the past and present scenes might seem attractive artistically, but really confusing for movie watchers. Such a way of rolling out the whole story makes it hard to understand the causal relations between some of the story elements.
An example (might be a content spoiler): it was quite a sudden when SinTai and PinYu appeared to fall in love, since that was a ridiculously quick move in emotion and it's all a magic burst of chemistry because of absolutely nothing. But at the end of film, it became more or less clear and therefore understandable: PinYu thought her engaged lover was dead/killed, thus when SinTai showed up and knew a strike that was previously only known by her engaged lover, she (mis)believed that SinTai was perhaps a gift to her that had sth. special to do with her engaged lover (in fact SinTai and her engaged lover are good friends).
Also SinTai's attitude towards/choice between saving the other common people by killing the daemon and saving his own hopeless/unfounded love by at least 10 times of incarnation makes the figure a little bit selfish. We do hope a hero (non-common person) to be as perfect as possible, don't we? Well, the director gave the story a happy end at last.
Surely, Kai/SinTai's Mandarin is not perfect, but good enough for a Finnish speaker, I would say. Another shortcoming, which is mentioned by other commenters too, is that the filming of the Kungfu scenes is bad. The actions of the actors are simply dances or anything but Kungfu!
Actually, I could't recall if I had seen any Finnish films before. This Finnish/Chinese co-production is not a bad start for me. I'd be interested in grabbing more, if available, to have a look.