Customer Reviews

Twin Daggers

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I had looked very much forward to watching "Twin Daggers". I am still glad I watched it, but it would not have been a terrible loss had I let it pass. I enjoy Lion's Gate films. They usually are fairly-well done and the action is not bad, but borders on ridiculous at times. "Twin Daggers" was all of this.

I almost turned it off about 15 minutes into it. I decided to let it run so I didn't have to get up from the couch and change movies :-) Because of that, I did get to see the improvements that came along a few minutes later. The acting is still poor, the fx poor, and the martial arts were okay. I watched the plot. The plot was good, got better, and finished up just fine. Lots of twists and turns (a lot predictable, but some not so much), which I like.

Bottom line: If you like movies that are a bit over the top, acting barely good enough, and a decent plot, go ahead. If you have to be spellbound throughout and all the bells and whistles have to be great, ahhhh...no.

The special effects are horrible and the eighties look is outdated. The stunts are horrible. The makeup effects are horrible. All those I just mentioned are just typical of the generation age. There's tackiness in the negative points mentioned. The dancing and the workout scene was cool because I wanted to be there. I loved how the character of Body had knife points that would pop out of her black thigh high boots. The Chinese vases scene was funny with the breaking and the Frenchman hanging on to all his precious artifacts. The Mime/ghost was really cool with his miming ghostliness. Compared to the other Martial Arts movies I wouldn't recommend this one to see ever.

The artwork on the front of the DVD cover is rather fake and misleading as it doesn't fit the content of the movie. The back of the DVD cover is the same.

Just so you know, the cover of this DVD is deceptive: the two fellows featured on it don't appear in the movie. There is an abundance of kung fu, but unfortunately, most of it - along with the rest of the film - is kinda silly. In a bad way. "Twin Daggers" tries but fails to break the curse of lackluster DTV action movies: as a Hong Kong action movie filmed in English (more or less), it fails to be as coherent as Drive or as mindlessly enjoyable as No Retreat, No Surrender. It's creative in some aspects, but these are muddled and kept from their full potential by alien scriptwriting and incompetent filmmaking. I do believe that this movie will fill an indecisive void for some people who have seen a lot of martial arts movies before this one and are ready for something new and crazy, but even if this is your niche, know that you're likely one of the few.

The story: a regrouped team of military-trained expert assassins - played by Rhett "Scholar" Giles (H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds), Veronica "Body" Bero (Hellinger), Joey "Flex" Covington (Tai Chi Warriors), and Vasilios "Ghost" E. (Kung Fu Killer) - is promised riches by a mysterious Chinese woman named Kay (Coco Su) for the covert killing of her twin sister Sue. As mutual suspicion and greed threatens the team's unity, their leader finds himself experiencing intimate feelings for his target...

A fight starts off the movie, and this encounter between Scholar and three Yakuza hitmen does a good job of displaying the strengths and glaring weaknesses of all the battles to come. All seven hand-to-hand battles are choreographed Hong Kong-style by a fellow called Kan Ng, who apparently hasn't done any work in film before, and this shows: while he does have a penchant for cool little touches - like Scholar using abacus beads as projectiles or Body kicking the individual planks of a wooden crate at an attacker - he trounces himself with hokey Matrix imitations, obvious stunt doubles, and modeling the pace of the encounters in '70s "wuxia" style even though the tone doesn't match its scenes. What really kills the fights, however, is an extremely incompetent editing department. Rarely before have I seen fisticuff scenes so poorly put together. Footage is sped up ridicuously and often, and characters drastically switch positions between almost every shot. It's nearly impossible to find an instance where the positioning of the fighters in one shot is within five feet of where they'll be standing/jumping/falling in the next shot, giving these scenes an extremely disjointed feel.

The rest of the film teeters on the falloff point as well. Having an American film be developed exclusively by a Chinese company is not a bad thing, but chances are it'll leave you with a very interesting-sounding script. Aside from the impression that all of the Asian actors are being fed their English lines by an off-camera prompter, there's some inauspicious translation in the form of over-the-top sincerity ("The worry in his eyes looks genuine") and just some plain weird contradictive lines ("Yes. Talk in my office. No"). There are also a handful of downright strange scenes, like when Body just happens to almost assassinate the wrong twin by accident and when Sue is encouraged by a woman to shake her breasts at an electric fan ("Whoo! Shake those melons, honey!"). Endless flashbacks punctuate a rather flawed twist during the movie's final minutes, ending the film on a strange note.

Essentially, it's possible to enjoy this movie as long as you appreciate unintentional weirdness, like martial arts fights but aren't picky about their quality, and aren't a stickler for acting. Again, I imagine it'd be perfectly possible for the right person to enjoy this film as a 90-minute time-waster, but - coming from a fan of dozens of varied low-budget kung fu flicks - I'm not one of them.

This movie has a Great twist in the Story. I thought it was Great. If you like kung-fu you will enjoy this movie.

I don't know why I bought this movie but it is HORRIBLE. The acting sucks, the fighting sucks, I didn't even waste the time to watch more than 10 minutes of this film. Pityful!!

Words cannot describe the masterpiece that is Twin Daggers, Action, Inrigue, Romance, this movie has it all. From the beginning my breath was taken away by Rhett Giles stellar performance. From the cinematography to the choreography, to the editing, everything is top notch. this is one Gem you wont soon forget, i promise you that.