The Myth
Dir Stanley Tong, Hong Kong 2007
Cine-Asia, £15.99

The Warlords
Dir Peter Chan, Hong Kong 2006
Metrodome, £19.99

Oh boy, it just doesn’t get any bigger than Jackie Chan and Jet Li going head-to-head in the battle of historical epics. The Myth (to bastardise current football punditry) is most definitely a film of two halves.

Dr Jack Chan (I kid you not) is a famed archæologist/tomb-raider who’s plagued by dreams of an ancient Chinese general’s love for an unobtainable concubine, Ok Soo (played by Korean goddess, Hee-seon Kim). Is he the reincarnation of General Meng Yi, his destiny to find and be reunited with his equally deathless princess?

By playing two utterly different characters Chan is able to incorporate such disparate elements as his trademark slapstick kung fu (I thought he was slowing down in New Police Story, I was very wrong) and a touching, stoical performance as the General (who makes the average Spartan seem as intimidating as Walter the Softie). Jackie has never seemed particularly comfortable as a romantic lead and it’s taken him deep into middle age to mature into a great actor.

Owing much to biblical epics and westerns in its scope and ambit­ion, The Myth freely cut-n-pastes from numerous genres. It’s a real martial arts film with much sword-play as well as unarmed-combat and one of the up-sides to Hong Kong’s returning to mainland China’s fold is the new generosity the government is showing in wanting to be involved in film production.

This means the hist­ory, costumes and practices of warfare on show here are as much an education as escapism. Throw in Jackie’s HK colleague, Tony Leung, some ravishing Indian locations with (equally ravishing) Bollywood legend Malika Sherawat, hours of outtakes, interviews and features, and the rain outside just fades away…

I’m glad I watched Jackie’s offering before The Warlords; although great, it would have seemed almost frivolous and 2D after this epic. A simply vast movie, this is a despairing masterpiece, chronicling the carnage and suffering of war, rather than the rather naïve chivalry of The Myth, nothing less than a Chinese Dr Zhivago.