The plot and character development are catastrophic, and simply lack any sense of believability. The visual effects are cheap and lousy. Some actors are just amateurs and give really bad performances. Yes, the production design and music score are OK, but they're just negligible compared to the defects.

There are plenty of entertaining action scenes in this movie, ranging from wire fu fighting to large scale CGI-monster fighting. These are imaginatively filmed and have some nice touches, even if here's nothing as good as the best action scenes from the previous Detective Dee movie, Phantom Flame.In between action, there is a very poorly told story.Actually, "story" is an exaggeration. It's more like a collection of incidents told in a particularly order. Everything just kind of happens. A ship battle results in disaster! A woman in a mask is in trouble! There's a merman! There are bandits! There's a new detective! There's a swimming horse! There are poison flowers! Everything is introduced by someone just saying, here is this thing that we need right now.There's a general rule in film that if the hero is going to pull out a gun in the final act, you want to establish that he owns a gun earlier on. That doesn't happen in this movie. Instead, there's a problem, and suddenly someone says, I know who can help, or, I've got the solution right here, or, the solution is at this place let's go right now.This is how a ten-year-old writes a story.No character development, little motivation, no real coherence. Dee's Sherlock Holmes deductions are generally unpersuasive.It's a dumb story, badly told, but the action scenes almost make up for that. Almost.

The first film, the Phantom Flame was a true intellectual adventure. We start to think we are watching a fantasy, with talking deer and such, then Dee figures out the tricks and it's all science or at least science fiction. There was a strong attempt to keep the story grounded in reality. I know the fights still used all the wire stuff, but it did not seem has hokey as in this movie. This film is just pure fantasy from the start, with phony fighting and monsters. What's weird is they had a good story with a plausible scientific plot, then they threw all this phony stuff on top of it. I found myself laughing at it several times and not in a good way. Why bother with the logical story, if you are going to have magic all around it?

I fall squarely in the camp of those who prefer this sequel to the original... I found Detective Dee to be a better made film in the sense that the acting was strong, time was spent on character development, tighter production values, etc., but somehow it was far from satisfying to an American sensibility. The Dee character wasn't strong or clever enough, the writing didn't come to a satisfactory conclusion, and the story was poor in both pacing and structure. There was hardly any 'detective' to Detective Dee.This prequel, though lighter weight and more far-fetched in almost every other way, is at very least more entertaining. The characters are clearly drawn with obvious strengths and weaknesses, the film moves at a fast clip and yet manages to avoid being too confusing, and the first ending, the fight on Bat Island, delivers a sufficient payoff. Unfortunately Tsui Hark can't keep himself from concluding with a huge and derivative effects sequence, but at that point the film was essentially over. And don't miss the mid-credits comedy bits, cute enough to be worthwhile.