This is a wonderful movie. There are many great fight scenes. The fight among the ladders is spectacular and creative. Incredible choreography. The story is smooth and engaging. The details are listed in other reviews here. If it's one thing that I'm learning from watching a lot of Chinese made movies, China's history with the US has made for so many generations of pain. Americans would do well to learn more about Chinese history before we are so critical of them.Jet Li is amazing -high flying and flexible as ever, graceful and solid and a riveting dramatic portrayal of legendary figure Wong Fei-hung. Yuen Biao is brilliant - stunning fight sequences and of course his trademark acrobatics, and his dramatic performance is emotionally nuanced as his character takes a few turns. The cast of supporting characters are just great. "Buck Teeth So" is adorable and lovable, "Porky Wing" as the translation calls him is a riot and very loyal. Aunt Yee (who was called Aunt 13 in the translation for some reason which made me laugh) gives excellent balance in a female role and Rosamund Kwan played her brilliantly. Some nice little touches of incidental humor thrown in as well.

I think this is both troubling as a film and revealing of Chinese character. As a standalone, it is I suppose fairly enjoyable, the cinematography is nice, the story long but intimate in spots, the fights some of them amazing. But, this is not just a standalone, it has a rich context - the protagonist is a popular folk hero, the times of foreign oppression and inept administration it depicts were real and left punishing scars in the Chinese soul.Something else bothers though. As a student of the Chinese model, I encounter this elsewhere, I believe it does a lot of bad, and turns away as many people as it brings in. What they Chinese do usually has both hard and soft aspects, Confucius and Tao would be on opposite ends of this, kung fu and meditation. When Western people are exposed to it, say with a film like this, unwittingly we register it as one picture. It endears, it's a scented romance. What isn't so easy to appreciate though is that to get that single harmonious picture the Chinese obsessively flatten their multifaceted experience, this is evident in the continuous reinvention, passionately undertaken, of both their political and martial arts narratives, and of course their penchant for opera. Naturally, corners have to be cut in the name of a tidy narrative.And this carries over in (cinematically) packaging these things in ways that eliminate subtler levels in what they do. Because the harmonizing effort is forcible, it can't help but take out of these things their soft wind, which is their real power in both the Taoist and creative sense. If you accept as I do that wisdom is tolerance and capacity for cognitive dissonance, this artificial harmony wherever encountered dumbs us down.In the film, you have the good sifu vs evil sifu, the good-natured but bumbling disciples, the evil street gang, the cruel army bureaucrat and foreign officials - all of them 'hard' stereotypes from the Boxer era, acted in a hard (external) manner. And I believe the point at some stage was to contrast soft 'chi' based awareness in the Jet Li character with hard 'iron body' kung fu in the rival master as the difference in karmas they set in motion. This has been flattened in favor of more or less the same kung fu.So hard politics, hard acting (mirrored in the opera stage and two 'fake' actors), hard martial arts in the service of mythmaking. Is there anything soft here, internal? The woman. She has come back from the West, straddles both worlds. She has come back with a camera, which she uses to snap pictures.Her eye is 'soft', stills motion, caresses the shadow of the one she loves. Too bad they didn't make more room for this, using it to cultivate dissonance, reflection, innate capacities for clarity and beauty, which could then transfer over to the fights.The music is marvelous though. And the camera glides as though on wires of its own.

Jet Li's done some exceptional work in China. I have not been impressed by anything he did in America. Tsui Hark's 'Wong Fei Hung' has already been stretched into several sequels of which I have only seen the first. 'Wong Fei Hung' has all the ingredients to make it an enjoyable epic movie. There is a story with a heart, some very well crafted choreography, good acting, and enough action and culture. It's set on a historical backdrop of a pre-Communist China. The characters are very well written (with the exception of the non-Chinese who act like caricature villains). Jet Li, Biao Yuen, Rosamund Kwan, Jacky Cheung and Kent Cheng all act well. It also presents some taboo elements such as Wong's affection for his 'aunt' (it was taboo during the time) but this is all skillfully underused which prevents the film from appearing too preachy. The film has several layers but it tries to tackle too many things at once and becomes unnecessarily complicated at some point. The film slightly drags in the first half and the choreography of the action scenes without the main cast looked a little shoddy. Yet, the characters are very likable and the story also offers a lot to enjoy that I am looking forward to its sequels. In my humble opinion, it's certainly one of the better martial arts films and has a lot more substance than pretentious films like 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon'. the only other Tsui Hark film I've seen is the magnificent 'Chat gim' and I've liked what I've seen so far.

Once Upon A Time In China is a good and ambitious movie with generally good performances. However, it also has boring parts and is, I think, generally a bit overrated. I rate this movie a 7 out of 10, and I have to say it is not as good as, say, Last Hero In China, or even Fong Sai Yuk.I am certainly a big fan of Wong Fei Hung (not to mention Jet Li and Yuen Biao!), but the problem with this movie is that it tries to be both a history movie and an action movie, and because of the disturbing influence of each of these elements upon the other, it doesn't quite succeed in being either one or the other. There isn't enough kung fu in it to be a really good kung fu movie, and the history is not quite treated seriously enough for it to be a really good history movie.I'd recommend watching Tai Chi II (a.k.a. Tai Chi Boxer, from 1996) for a movie that extremely successfully blends humor, history and brilliant kung fu. It is far superior to this one.