Too much of everything

i must have seen a different film!!

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Yuen Biao's leading role and the promise of yet another titanic ding-dong between him and sparring partner Yuen Wah was enough to sell me THE ICEMAN COMETH, a 1989 Hong Kong film that takes HIGHLANDER's central premise and reinvents it with a Chinese spin. Unfortunately, the film is far from the cult classic that it has been advertised as, although it does have much to recommend it. The film features an unlikely combination of comedy and drama, pathos, and more familiar martial arts stunts and action.Unfortunately the subject matter is very dark and the film is often depressing. The central villain is a rapist and at least one scene – a rape in a car – is done in incredibly bad taste, souring the experience of the film as a whole. Clocking in at one hour fifty minutes, the film is also very talky, and much of the dialogue centres around Maggie Cheung as the love interest. Cheung plays an obnoxious hooker, far from her sweet character in the POLICE STORY films. Here she's brash and unpleasant, unappealing to the viewer. Unfortunately much of the comedy centres around her instead of letting the male actors enjoy the type of physical hijinks so beloved of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung.While Cheung is an immediate detraction every time she's on screen, the film is bolstered by Yuen Biao's typically strong leading performance; he's a far better actor than Christopher Lambert, the man he imitates at times, and he ably handles the dramatic scenes along with the comedic ones – the sequence in which he drinks from a toilet bowl is hilarious, made more so by Biao's acting of the innocent. Biao is matched by Yuen Wah, never more evil than he is here as the villain. I have to say, though, that it's pretty odd to see the skinny Wah stripped to his underwear and showing off his muscles to a hooker. With two top martial artists in the film, you can guarantee some great fights, and the film doesn't disappoint in the action stakes.Sword duels, a great battle on top of a car suspended in the air by a crane, and the top-notch one-on-one at the film's climax, which is set in a museum, certainly add up to counter the movie's deficiencies. The painful final fight is a particular keeper and the best showdown we've seen between Biao and Wah – their later chandelier ruckus in ONCE UPON A Chinese HERO is short and unspectacular in comparison. The film boasts some really good '80s animation that I'd choose over CGI any day. THE ICEMAN COMETH is a very different style film than we're used to from Hong Kong. With a better director and more action, it would have been a classic to rival DRAGONS FOREVER. As it is, it's an unwieldy movie with some great fights but a plodding storyline and Maggie Cheung's worst ever role.

The movie had elements of Highlander and Les Visiteurs and some other time travel type movies, like Demolition Man (though this movie precedes Demolition Man). It is about two warriors from the Ming Dynasty. One is a psychotic killer while the other is an honourable royal guard who has to arrest the killer in twenty days or be executed himself. He chases the killer to Buddha's time wheel, originally designed to force Evil to experience a hundred life times, but used now to escape into the future. They meet, fight, and fall of a cliff and are frozen in ice only to be revived in the 20th Century.This movie goes through all of the stages of culture shock in regards to time travel. Cars being monsters, television, and the old toilet and light switch jokes, which were performed heaps better in Les Visiteurs, but then Les Visiteurs was purely a comedy movie while this movie is more of a typical Hong-Kong action comedy. Then comes the shock of the changes, the Ming Dynasty has collapsed and everything has changed. Women has risen in status to a point where, as Ching is convinced, men are subservient. Then there is the bad guy who fits in with society reasonably well, except that he goes for pearls instead of Rolex watches.I enjoyed it, as generally I like Hong Kong movies. There is little in the way of in-depth themes, or none that I can draw out of it (unlike John Woo films). There is the struggle of Ching to come to terms with the collapse of his empire, but this is something that we don't face, or not on his level. Yes, we find that at times our life simply collapses to a point where everything has changed, but I don't think The Iceman Cometh is design to provoke such thoughts. I think this movie is purely designed to entertain with martial arts extravaganzas. Woo seems to deal more with interweaving thought into his films, especially with the Killer, but we never really see Woo films on SBS. This is a good movie and would watch it again.

Yuen Biao is the most underrated martial artist of his generation. In my opinion his acrobatic skills outdo both Jackie Chan and Jet Lee although for some reason he isn't as highly rated as JC and JL. This film, his finest, is actually a sort of sci fi/fantasy film. He stars as a warrior of the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century. He and his adversary are fighting and they both fall of a cliff and are frozen; only to be found in the 20th century by scientists and accidentally unfrozen. This film with it's fantasy plot could have been his worst but with his acting, the fighting and the outrageous comedy with the lovely femme fetale Maggie Cheung this is a modern and all time classic. The things Yuen Biao does in this film show why I rate his acrobatic skills higher than JC and JL. The comedy interplays with violent action with Yuen Wah's performance as a sadistic villain spot on. The script is pretty intelligent and the jokes come thick and fast making fun of the late 1980s seen through the 16th century eyes of Yuen Biao who discovers television, electricity and... toilets. The jokes however aren't as glaringly obvious as Jackie Chan and some (very few) Jet Lee films (as very few Jet Li films are comedic if any); the humour is like an episode of The Simpsons, you have to recognise them but when you do they are really funny and actually very intelligent and heartwarming jokes. Maggie Cheung is absolutely brilliant in surely an Oscar winning role as the hard hearted hooker with a soft inside, she shows here that only she could have played this role perfectly. However Yuen Biao just steals the show from Maggie Cheung with his portrayal of a serious but innocently funny warrior. Also the chemistry between Yuen Biao and Maggie Cheung is absolutely electric, they really do sizzle when they are both on screen together. Also unlike Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung films the humour is played with a straight face throughout and this film is the better for it. A modern classic with some great humour fused with some violent fights and the best acting I have ever seen. The ending also has a wonderful bitter-sweet denouement. One more thing is the soundtrack. It is absolutely wonderful and the best bits are the xylophone and the violin when Yuen Biao messes up some very simple house tasks. Surely this film defined the words "all time classic".

"Iceman Cometh" starts out as a manhunt by Ming royal guard Yuen Biao after a rapist-killer of thirteen women in the royal palace, including a relative of the emperor. The guard is transported along with the killer to a snow covered area by a Tibetan wheel with time travel properties. After the two are frozen in the snow, a scientific expedition finds them years later and brings their frozen bodies back to modern Hong Kong. The guard and killer are accidentally thawed out, and the guard ends up getting involved with a call girl (Maggie Cheung)Maggie Cheung steals every scene she is in. Yuen Biao is tops in action scenes with his opponent, the actor who played Panther in "Supercop," but Biao is no match for Maggie. She uses him first as a housekeeper to clean up her messy apartment, then as an enforcer to shake down her clients for additional payoff money. She is the one with most of the problems, from a pimp who threatens to throw acid in her face if she doesn't go out with a client to her later run in with the rapist murderer.The movie also has some nice technical effects when the Tibetan wheel goes into its time traveling mode at the end of the movie, but the real special effect is Maggie Cheung's acting range. She can project some personality on the screen.