With a better script and thought this could have been a great film. The cinematography is good and the set designs excellent but the plot and script let it down. Yuen was getting older here but still has some good moves and can act, unlike many of the others including Kaneshiro. But Yuen Tak can fight if way over the top in his villain role. The rest of the characters are not memorable but several of the set piece fights are good.

A remake of The Boxer from Shantung, Hero is the story of Ma Wing-jing (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and his older brother Ma Tai-cheung (Yuen Wah), who have left their home to find fortune on the streets of Shanghai.

Sadly, the streets are not paved with gold and the brothers find themselves merely existing by doing manual labor. Yet one day while admiring gangster Tam Sei's (Yuen Biao) horse carriage, Ma Wing-jing is challenged to a race: Tam Sei's horse against his human running ability. Sure, he loses, but the two become friends.

Tam Sei may have the British government on his side, but his rival Yang Shuang (Yuen Tak) has the cops on his payroll. Once Ma Wing-jing saves Tam Sei from an assassination attempt, he is given some territory and power, which goes to his head. He eventually pushes himself toward fighting Yang Shuang on his own.

Director Corey Yuen and writer Jeffrey Lau made a gangster epic that is only 90 minutes long plus it has martial arts and wild moments like Yuen Biao rising from a coffin and blasting numerous rifles, not to mention a fight atop a speeding train between Yuen Wah and Baio for a silver watch. Also: so many axe wounds, slices and decapitations.

A movie that has plenty of guts and gore, this takes The Boxer from Shantung, takes a little bit of every great gangster film that came between 1972 and 1997 - John Woo, Scorsese, De Palma, Coppola - frenetically paces the whole thing and dares you to keep up.

A rare post studio closure kung fu spectacular from the Shaw Brothers. Even Mona Fong is involved. Longtime kung fu actor and director, Corey Yuen, has the reins.

The plot follows the exploits of a refugee from Shangdong province, Ma Wing Ching, and his brother as they try to climb the ladder of success in the chaos of colonial Shanghai in the 1930's. Ma Wing Ching is a super kung fu fighter although it's never explained how he got so good. He gets involved with the local king pin Tam See, played by Yuen Biao and falls in love with a beautiful singer at one of Tam See's nightclubs. After fighting off a rival gang, Ma Wing Ching is given a chance to work for Tam See but he refuses and proceeds to build a criminal empire of his own. But it's a nice criminal empire as Ma is sympathetic to the plight of the exploited Shanghai coolies! All doesn't go well as Ma becomes the target of the rival gangs.

The first thing I noticed was the excellent recreation of Shanghai and all the period trappings. This is a well designed film. The martial arts are as expected from Corey Yuen and well done. When the action is going it's very entertaining. Unfortunately Mr. Yuen's cartoonish style seems at odds with the very realistic sets. The fights are absolutely fantastic in both senses of the word. Things happen that are completely unrealistic and that sort of hurts the film. Mr. Yuen also has no sense of epic scale and many of the great sets are never shown very well. The camera-work is good but not anything to raise the film up above a dozen other martial art films of the last twenty years. The story treats the characters very superficially and that causes boredom to set in at times.

Fun but not among the greats.