Henchwomen Fight

In 2022 movie The Ancient City of Loulan. Actress Jingwen Xu plays as villainess Xiao Cang. A movie I watch for the first time, hope it's fun..

So basically the movie starts with Cang killing a poor man as she's leading expedition to steal Chinese historical relics.. 

As they were digging, they were attacking with supernatural bad CGI insects, the actors are doing their best, but the CGI looks awful, and to be fair, I don't think they can be done practically, that's why many movies when they do effects like that, they get dark settings so they don't look obviously fake. 

Basically the first 6 minutes of the movie feel as if they don't belong there, especially that they aren't background story of one of the characters but part of the story of the current movie, and they feel that they belong at least half hour in..

Hell, she just cut man's arm around 12 minutes, I didn't expect that, especially in ChinFucking hese movie..

The creators of this movie is having so much fun with the characters, like the heroes basically endanger each others for their own benefit, in a comedic way, the movie basically treat the story as a video game, and I really like it, it's fun.

I'm sure that's not like the greatest action movie ever made, but it's so good, I will never enjoy any modern Hollywood movie as much as I'm enjoying this one, I'm so immersed in the action, I'm not paying attention to the time, and if an action movie achieved that, no matter how small or big its budget is, it succeeded..

So, we have the heroine called Yi Ran played by Kimmy Tong Fei, and the hero Chen Xiao played by Max Mok Siu-Chung, and their friend who rescued Ni Qiu played by Li Yi, and the main villain Hikari Tori played by Minowa Yasufumi..

Around 42 minutes Xiao Cang impaled a collaborator with a sword, she's soulless, she didn't even flinch, like a deadly scorpion fast and deadly..

Ok, the hero put Xiao Cang under the sword to force Hikari Tori's hand to let them go, but Hikari Tori basically didn't care, and the hero was like "You are a lunatic", like, what did you expect? The man minutes ago was trying to find the secret to immortality to his emperor, not himself, not a woman he loves, but the emperor, and if he's willing to find and gift immortality it means he doesn't even care about his own life, and thus wouldn't care about the lives of others to achieve what he considered higher purpose, yeah, I always say villains for me metaphorical of selfishness, and they mostly are, but in this case we are dealing with a selfless villain, which why I personally don't find heroes appealing to me, due to their selfless nature, that's why I also consider heroes a collective localized concept while villains are individualistic globalized concept, because if you see Hikari Tori from the collective angle, the character sacrifice the self, deny their individuality for his collective, that's why he's seeking immortality only to serve his collective, and that's for his collective he's seen as a hero, and from the opposite collective he's seen as a heartless villain, for the same exact reason, that his actions are inhumane, that's why in order to humanize heroic character, you need to give them individualistic motive, even if they have also a collective goal, which is why in movies the villains take someone that the hero really care about or love, and use such individualistic goal to humanize them for people who aren't part of the collective.

I'm 1 hour 6 minutes in the movie now, and the monsters looks much better in the dark environment, and would look even more better with a little adjustment of the light..

Did I just say the monsters look good under ground? Well, I take it back LOL, because they look awful once again around 1 hour 8 minutes.

The main villain died in explosion, really, that's it? Like, the whole movie didn't have a challenging villain, till now with the main villain and Xiao Cang, and now the main villain died that easy even before Xiao Cang!!

Xiao Cang last confrontation just happen moments afterwards in 1 hour 17 minutes..

The movie was awesome, I really miss these fun movies, and Japanese villains are the best when it comes to Chinese movies, I wish if the confrontation was longer, it kind of feels they wrapped things up quickly, while they could have had a longer fight, even if the main villain died in explosion, at least I was expecting to get a good fight afterwards, and maybe a long challenging fight between the heroine and the villainess and at least the villainess get an upper hand at some point in the fight..

Anyway, Jingwen Xu was great playing the villainess in this movie, with her firm merciless and sometimes soulless reactions, she's a really good actress, I hope to see more movies of her..

I couldn't keep watching the movie on Youtube, once they censored the sound of the shooting and explosions, I stopped watching, so, If you don't mind that, you can watch it on Youtube, if you found it annoying and ruin the movie for you like I did, you should watch it full on IQIYI here.