This movie is best known in the US as "A Man Called Hero". It is based on the comic book by Wing-Shing Ma that follows the adventures of Hero Hua, born under the Star of Death and cursed to bring unhappiness to those he cares for. This adaptation tells the story from the point of view of several people that knew Hero, told to Hero's son, who is searching for his father. We follow the path of Hero from his early student days in Mainland China and up to his eventual migration to the US. There are many characters from the comic book making small cameos. The final battle between Hero and his nemesis Invincible (what's in a name!) takes place on top of the Statue of Liberty!. Best enjoyed by someone who has either read the comic book or likes Asian Fantasy/Martial Arts films. An overall great movie for a Friday Night with a group of friends.

If you reside in the real world, then this movie will strike you as naive, crude, and bigoted. Credit should be given for the attempt to set the movie outside of China, but the snarky Europeans hired to play Americans, a bunch of undersized frenchmen no doubt ;'), and the heavy handed evil Americans routine, departs from realism pretty quickly.Halfway through, the plot mutates into the martial-arts as magic universe, and though a lot of work is put into CGI effects, there is nothing here for anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the last decade to write home about.We also get a dose of infantile romantic complications that would embarrass Aaron Spelling, some really cheesy music, and generally lame melodramatic scenes.My favorite, an inexplicable fastcut sequence from several angles of Hero standing in a burning building holding Jade as she dies, the music tracks dramatically with the cuts, is he trapped? ...will he die? Nope he just walks out a second later. What the...?The plot tumbles on with a Ninja vs Chinese subplot, and then for some reason climaxes with a Chinese revolt against the 'Racist men fom the Klu Klux Klan' who run a mine where Chinese workers are oppressed. Someone's been carping their history from 'The Peoples History of the US' it seems.If I had to classify this movie I'd use Sword and Sorcery with too much dialogue and dialectic.

After watching The Storm Riders, I was expecting the same delights from A Man Called Hero. However, I was to be sorely disappointed as this film just looks like a rush job to capitalise on the back of The Storm Riders' success.A Man Called Hero is made by basically the same team as that behind The Storm Riders, with many of the original cast making a return (with the noteable exception of Aaron Kwok). The style of the original story, however, is really very different from Storm Riders, but the back room team failed to acknowledge this and tried to copy exactly what they did in the earlier film and in a hurried manner.What we've ended up with is a film that lacks any continuity and pace. The bulk of the film is slow and arduous to watch as you're dying to get it moving. There are gaps in the story, leaving questions in your head that are never answered. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen Hero, there is the "But what happened to...?" question at the end of the film.Where there is comfortable pace in the film, that turned out to be in the action sequences, but these itself was very lacklustre. The scenes were way too short to give any significant enjoyment, and relied too heavily on the special effects capability of the film, which in itself didn't excel itself as well as The Storm Riders. One example is the rendering of the Statue of Liberty compared to the Giant Buddha in the earlier film. The Giant Buddha had amazing attention to detail, making it look very realistic, whereas Liberty looks very artificial. And in Hero, all the action scenes rely on the SFX, as opposed to the SFX adding to the scene.In Hollywood animation studios, it usually takes many years of painstaking work to render and animate a film. I somehow feel that the production companies involved here felt more concerned about bringing in revenues quickly than to really pay attention to detail, which I feel is a big shame. But having said that, that is something that can be rectified, and a future film that features the real achievements of The Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero

This was one of the finer martial arts movies I've seen. I thought it was great, especially seeing Ekin Cheng and Nicholas Tse together. I thought the effects were great, the acting was decent and the plot keeps you delightfully confused. To the guy that wrote the first thing, I'm sorry if you are offended