Following the success of his Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, Tsui Hark delves back into the sleuth's past with this spirited prequel. A "Beauty and the Beast" tale with wire-fu adornments, it finds Dee (Mark Chao, replacing Andy Lau) embroiled in a mystery involving two hostile sea creatures, a group of masked assassins and an imperilled courtesan in the Tang Dynasty capital of Luoyang. Realism may not be an issue here, but Tsui is still guilty of going completely overboard with the digital effects (it was originally made in 3D, explaining all that in-your-face action), but his trademark gravity-bending acrobatic fight sequences are in generous supply. A crackpot doctor with the arm of an ape is among the film's more bizarre pleasures, but is wholly in keeping in a restless martial arts adventure as fantastical as it is fun.
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