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SYNOPSIS: KANG So-hwi, a beautiful martial arts prodigy, is about to embark on a journey into adulthood. But her journey is like no other. Her super-human strength and martial arts prowess scares away her fellow undergrads and even the boy she has fallen for.
Devastated, So-hwi decides to give up martial arts and takes a different path. Her father, a martial artist himself, is afraid of losing an heiress to the family’s martial artistry, and missions So-hwi’s old buddy Il-young to persuade her to stay in the field.
Meanwhile, the evil Heuk-bong provokes a war to conquer the martial arts world with the legendary Fine Blade he stole in the past, killing every swordsman one after another. So-hwi’s father comes to a showdown with Heuk-bong, but the battle leaves him fatally injured. On the brink of her father’s death, So-hwi picks up a sword again with a burning desire for revenge.
MOVIE REVIEW:
As a Kungfu Wire-fu comedy featuring a female protagonist, My Mighty Princess is only slightly better than the abysmal Shaolin Girl. The slight advantage that My Mighty Princess had was that it had some nice chorography of the fighting sequences and an innovative usage of the prized sword, the Green Destiny.
Backed by a team of Hong Kong Stunt team, this film is packed with some nice chorography of action. The key words here are “some” and “nice” as there are only a handful of action scenes that looked nice and while it’s nice, it was far from being impressive, specially when the plentiful of wire works that showcase those boring zero gravity “Kungfu” skills.
However, the innovate usage of the prized sword, the Green Destiny (which made one wonder if they paid royalties to a certain Crouching Tiger copyright holder) was impressive to note. The usage was well presented and does push the imaginative realm of “wuxia” world a bit further.
Otherwise, everything else was pretty bland.
The comedy here was as unfunny and forced like Shaolin Girl. From it’s opening act of demonstrating the Princess’s toughness to an unappreciative audience to having the princess drinking from a skater’s shoe as a part of the initiation sabotage, the jokes just felt flat, tiresome and unnecessary crude.
Similar to Shaolin Girl, My Mighty Princess also added sport element into the mix without any intention or ability to fully develop it. It became pointless and ineffective subplots that drag on and on.
The pointlessness was extended to the love triangle (or should I say rectangle) between the protagonist and her male co-stars. Unlike the director cut of Daisy, the recent Korean drama helm by Hong Kong director Andrew Lau, which was able to give each of the individuals in the love triangle a fair amount of focus and strength, this movie just falter aimlessly at attempting a love triangle movie.
It had gotten even worse when this film attempted to add the May December romance (Older woman / Younger man or Jie Di Lian). It might be a popular topic with Korean Drama series but here, it just felt forced and added without a valid reason except to follow the trend.
All these problems indicate that this film tried to take on too many various elements that might have been successful elsewhere but ended up choking on the subplots and succeeding in very limited aspect. The story telling felt patchy and uneventful that it make one wonder how did a director of My Sassy Girlfriend (which started a trend in Asian movies) came up with something so copied, so unfunny and so half hearted.
SPECIAL FEATURES :
Trailer
The Making of
It’s basically snippets showcase of the filming process of My Mighty Princess that being roughly patched together. Some snippets show the “difficulties” of making those action sequences / wire-fu while others showcase the stars fooling around.
Interview
The three stars of My Mighty Princess chat about their characters and various tidbits information that happened during the filming process. This section is mostly as bland as the movie and the only interesting information revealed here is that a bunch of Hong Kong stunt team was hired to work on this film action sequence and it’s lead by Dion, the protégé of Yuen Woo Ping.
Photo Gallery
This extra feature contains about 1.38 mins of photo stills from the movie.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The disc’s visual transfer is commendable and it comes only with the original Korean soundtrack.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING :
Review
by Richard Lim Jr
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