Dragon/Wu Xia

Dragon/Wu Xia, despite the very generic title, is one of the freshest and most unique of martial art films I've seen in quite a while.  Notably, because it fuses the detective/mystery genre with the martial arts, using a nice sort of modern day CSI type of special effects infused storytelling.  In equal measure of the film's effectiveness, Donnie Yen as the outlaw killer turned simple country papermaker, brings actual real heartfelt acting without his usual pretension, for an even  more progressive change that he quite effectively capitalized on in the Ip Man movies recently, that is quite on equal par with Takeshi  Kaneshiro's performance of the detective in pursuit of him.   Add to that, a great charismatic performance by martial arts legion Jimmy Wang (The One Armed Swordsman and The Chinese Boxer) and actress Tang Wei (Lust, Caution).  Wu Xia is a beautifully shot movie in the tradition of A History Of Violence, that doesn't disappoint and is very engaging with layers of intrigue, mystery, and depth. It's a very nice and almost seemless blending of art and action.  I reiterate the great performance of Yen and I think that is easily his best and most mature in acting I've seen to date. This movie more than lived up to the hype and easily should be a great sleeper, unfortunately only suffering from the lack of promotional exposure that it justly deserves.