Already adapted into a 2006 online game, a 2007 stage prequel and a 2009 animated film, the phenomenally successful 80-episode martial-arts sitcom My Own Swordsman (2006) had a high mountain to climb for a feature-film version. The surprise is that — with the original director and lead writer, plus virtually all the main cast, on board again — the result isn't a lazy, TV-style ploughing of the same furrow. Characters have been developed and slightly changed during the four-year gap so that they are still recognisable but have a fresh feel and dynamics; direction by Shang Jing (尚敬) is big-screen cinema stuff, opening out the action to show the whole town rather than just the interior of the inn in which the CCTV series was set; and framing and editing are similarly cinematic.
Even more notably, the movie has some of the liveliest and best-staged action-comedy seen so far in a Mainland movie without any offshore help: the finale in the booby-trapped inn is the equal of anything in a similar Hong Kong movie.
The film starts right in the middle of a piece of action and assumes the audience is already familiar with all the characters and catchphrases. But by the time the plot — centred on the very contemporary problem of property speculation and real-estate development — gets into gear around the half-hour mark, the relationships and backgrounds are no real problem even for newcomers. Writer Ning Caishen (寧財神), uses many of the same ingredients that made the TV series such a hit — modern-style dialogue, anachronistic references, use of dialect and accents — as well as animation, parodies of TV and even karaoke. But they don't swamp the main movie, which has its own personality; and even a clip from the original series is used to explain the introduction of a new character (Wang Lei's 王磊 very funny professional assassin, who is so money-obsessed that he carries round an abacus). The major beneficiary from the characters' development is the inn-owner of lead actress Yan Ni (閆妮, Cow 鬥牛), now a broody businesswoman whose sudden rantings provide many of the comic highlights. Exteriors, shot in picturesque Yi county, Anhui province, provide a satisfyingly local flavour. (FilmBiz.Asia)
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