The sequel to one of the biggest Hong Kong box-office hits of all time, The Storm Warriors is one of the most hotly anticipated releases of the past few years. Sadly, it falls into the same trap of many sequels, and the end product is simply something that isn't anywhere near as good as the original.

If you haven't seen the first movie, or the animated follow-up Clash of Evils, the viewer can be forgiven if they feel a bit lost with the proceedings, since The Storm Warriors makes no attempt to catch the audience up at all. Sure, the series as a whole is based on a popular Chinese comic, Fung Wan, so the native audience probably has familiarity with the basics, but it would have been nice if the Pang brothers had given some lead-up to the latest events in the lives of Wind (Ekin Cheng) and Cloud (Aaron Kwok), especially since it's been eleven years since The Storm Riders hit Hong Kong screens.

Anyway, the plot boils down to Wind and Cloud having to team up to take out Lord Godless (Simon Yam), who has captured the emperor (Patrick Tam) in order to retrieve the Dragon Bone, which holds the key to taking over China. How or why the Dragon Bone holds China's destiny is never explained, and just one of The Storm Warriors' many plot holes. Even though the movie runs 110 minutes, it feels like nothing is accomplished story-wise, especially since the ending offers no resolution at all. In all probability, this was done to leave room for a sequel, but this sort of film-making, which seems to becoming more and more common since the Kill Bill movies, is coming off more and more as just pure sloppiness and/or laziness.

The pedestrian story isn't helped along by the acting at all. Though he has shown that he can actually act with movies like After This Our Exile, Aaron Kwok is still one of the most dull leading men in Hong Kong, and the long-time bane of this site, Ekin Cheng, doesn't fare much better. At least their hair looks good. The rest of the cast looks simply to be going through the motions, with only Charlene Choi putting some fire into her role. Disappointingly, her good work is in vain, since her character ends up being just another empty love interest, which are all too present in these types of films.

Now, you might be thinking that the special effects and fight scenes would save the day here. That is true, at least to a very small extent. Overall, The Storm Warriors does look really good and shows that while Hong Kong special effects still aren't up to the level of their western counterparts, at least they can play in the same ballpark. Despite the obvious technical proficiency put forth here, the action still comes off as flat and not as vibrant as it should be.

Part of this is due to the uninventive locations the action plays out in. You can only see so many scenes taking place in caves or on mountains before the initial sheen wears off. The other element hampering what should be the most exciting parts of The Storm Warriors is the unoriginality of the action itself. Do we need yet another production that is "inspired" by 300? Like The Matrix's "bullet-time" before it, the whole comic-book primary-colored slow-motion blood-spurting aesthetic put out by 300 has become a tired filmic crutch and really needs to be taken out of every director's cinematic vocabulary.

The glum mood this reviewer is espousing with The Storm Warriors might very well be a case of over-anticipation, given how fun The Storm Riders was (not to mention how it became a benchmark for special effects in Hong Kong productions) and how long it took the sequel to come to fruition. But even taking that into account, it's hard to fathom anyone but the most ardent and deluded fanboys being able to defend The Storm Warriors as anything other than a big-budget disappointment.

RATING: 4