My Rating: ★★★★
The Eagle Shooting Heroes (射鵰英雄傳之東成西就) is a comedy wuxia film from Hong Kong that was released 5 February 1993.
About
The plot can be found on the IMDB website but in case of this film I’m not sure it really matter so much. The film is a quick fire comedy movie that was released in time for the Lunar New Year.
Cast
Leslie Cheung (張國榮) as Huang Yao Shi
We mainly watched this movie because of Leslie Cheung. 10 years after this movie had been released he committed suicide due to his battle with clinical depression.
Review
This is a parody of The Legend of the Condor Heroes.
The film was totally bonkers but despite that they manage to keep it on its path. If you watch it don’t take it too seriously and don’t worry if you can’t follow the plot because it’s near impossible to do so.
The action wuxia style sequences were very well done, most of them speeded up in the final version. One of the first wuxia scenes you could actually see the wires movie the actors around from above, not that it really mattered. Everything was very slapstick from start to finish.
It was quite surprising to see the gay and lesbian scenes even though the context of them were kind of “unwanted” or “mistaken”. For example, one character wanted to ascend to heaven but couldn’t do so without hearing “I Love You” three times from someone who had an emblem on their chest, which happened to be Leslie Cheung’s character.
Watching the film I thought at first this could be equivalent to a British “Carry On” but with martial arts. Maybe it was a little.
There was music in the film but it sounded as though the speaker was inside a tin can. It seemed the version of the film we saw had been digitised from the original one and the sound track was different too, especially the music.
The film seemed very unique and I doubt if the will make anything like that again, it is certainly worth a watch from that perspective.
Summary
I would give the film 4/5 because it was great to see Leslie Cheung in another production but also the amount of work they must have put into this must have been a big undertaking. It was hilarious.
