The Water Margin DVD Region 3

Ngok Wah (Actor) | Ti Lung (Actor) | Guk Fung | David Chiang

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Customer Review of "The Water Margin"

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Average Customer Rating for this Edition: Customer Review Rated Bad 8 - 8.2 out of 10 (4)
Average Customer Rating for All Editions of this Product: Customer Review Rated Bad 7 - 7.2 out of 10 (5)

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Kevin Kennedy
See all my reviews

May 7, 2007

Overstuffed and overlong Customer Review Rated Bad 6 - 6 out of 10

"The Water Margin" starts with a long, tedious opening sequence; five minutes wasted on long range shots of ships coming to shore, troops emerging from them, then lots of marching around by the troops. This is followed by a long scene at an inn in which the overstuffed cast toasts each other. When we finally get a fight scene, the fight choreography is laughable. David Chiang does lots of tumbling, then, when he barely touches two much larger men, they go flying.

Fortunately, the movie gets better in the middle segments, but, with such a large cast and so much story to tell, director Chang Cheh clearly had trouble maintaining the film's narrative drive and focus. Ultimately, "The Water Margin" seems to run much longer than its actual two-hour running time.

Here's the central problem with this film: The story is plucked from the middle of a very long, very complicated novel. Yet the movie makes little attempt to give the viewer a sense of the larger context in which this story occurs and, by featuring such a large cast, gives the viewer very little reason to care about any of the characters. The filmmakers should have provided more context and simplified the story line, thus allowing for greater character development. Perhaps this would have been less true to the novelistic source, but it would have made for a better movie.

I have to mention the awful soundtrack music. When they are not stealing riffs from bad spaghetti Westerns, they are dredging up overly loud licks from dreadful early 1970s-style hard rock. It is jarringly misplaced.