So after what was an 1hr & 30min of movie - the thing has like 11min of credits ffs - I still have no fucking idea wth was going on in this thing. There was a sword that does something, maybe, I...I don't fucking know okay. I don't think I've ever sat though a whole move and came out saying "IDFK wtf was going on in this". This movie is flat out atrocious, I hated ever minute of it. Though most of its production doesn't show it, the movie feels incredibly direct-to-video. It has bad, obvious, dubbing, completely fucked up subtitles that either subtitle things that aren't being said or are out of sync. It has been a while since I've seen the original but I'm pretty sure this has fucking nothing to do with that one at all other then Michelle Yeoh's character and Chow Yun-fat's character's sword - I think that's it, the movie does a horrendous job in establishing it's setting as I guess it expects its audience to remember these points of the first movie that came out roughly 16 years ago. It really isn't much of a sequel at all but more so an incredibly cheep knock off. It slaps "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" on its title with little to no understanding to what made Ang Lee's film such a hit. For one thing it is barley Wuxia at all - it is more modernized blockbuster trash. The fight sequences don't have the grace or technical prowess of any of the other Wuxia films I've seen - which is a surprise as the director of this was the guy who choreographed the fight sequences in Ang Lee's original film. The fight sequences in this are flat out uninspired & boring, they don't even come close to the ones in the original or in any other good Wuxia film like House of Flying Daggers. There is just no inventiveness or fun to them, that is literally the whole point to the fight sequences in these types of movies. The imagination should be running high when it comes to creating the fight sequences and that just isn't the case in this film at all. The narrative is weak and I found it incredibly hard to give any fucks about anything that is going on (cause, you know, I had no fucking clue wtf was going on). Characters feel uninspired, lack development, and feel completely non-existent. And then the movie expects me to give a fuck when one of him dies ("oh no the guy whose only characteristic was that he drank a bunch just died, he was my favorite!"). What I found hilarious was when at the end the movie was like "these characters were who died were super important and names will go down in our time periods shit history", lol like hell they are. The whole movie really does feel like a shameless ploy to capitalize on the originals popularity in the states; the only problem is that the movies is roughly 15 years to late to do that. All in all, this movie is horrible everyone involved in its production should be hit in the face with an anvil and then fired into the sun.