If you are easily offended or are a film snob in any way, Hero Beyond the Boundaries of Time is not the movie for you. Sporting more than its' fair share of potty-mouthed humor and scatalogical references, Hero gleefully fillets the classic literary character of Wai Siu-Bo. Building its' foundation on jokes centering around boobs and boners that are right up Beavis and Butt-head's alley, this is not a picture you can enter into with the logical part of your brain on at all, lest you fall prey to an unfortunate aneurysm.

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai reprises one of the first roles he played (and also one his TVB classmate Stephen Chow essayed in the Royal Tramp films) by going back to portraying Wai Siu-Bo, who is one of the emperor's (Ken Tong) most trusted confidants and closest friends. The emperor is in a funk with a mystery illness and has taken to smoking copious amounts of marijuana to ease the pain. Perhaps due to his ingestation of the devil's weed, the emperor comes upon the idea of sending Wai 300 years in the future to find his perfect wife. Surely, with a solid plan like that, nothing can go wrong, right?

Well, of course, any and every thing does go wrong, mostly due to Wai tending to think with his lower head. Never one to turn down a slice of squish, Wai (along with his sidekick played by Dicky Cheung) spends his time being fascinated by modern day elements like gangsta rap and hostess clubs to take his search for the emperor's wife all that seriously. But after he finds out that not only he's layed pipe to the target of his quest (Ng Suet-Man) but a duo of assassins (Wong Man-Shing and Spohia Crawford) and his frisky wife (Veronica Yip) are after him, Wai gets serious about finding the emperor his predestined partner in the horizontal dance department.

If the above plot description hasn't turned you off from watching Hero Beyond the Boundaries of Time , then you'll probably have a good time with it. Yes, it's crude and stupid, but ultimately nice brainless fun, and there's even a solid wire-fu finale planted in at the end that should please fans of high-flying Hong Kong action. Tony Leung was doing a lot of comedies around this time, many of them of negligible quality, but he always took any role he was given seriously and with panache, which undoubtedly led to his work in later, more serious, pictures like the next year's Chungking Express -- which is a watershed point in Leung's career -- coming off with just that much more sheen and class. If for nothing else, Hero is an interesting movie to look at in the progression of Leung's filmography.

RATING: 6