Review: Butterfly and Sword is a swordplay / fantasy kung fu movie, this movie is primarily high paced martial arts action. Set in a typical fantasy setting of ancient china most of the story is based on conflict between various martial arts groups. The story is a little confusing as there are some twists in the plots but the main trouble we had was being able to follow the dialog which left us a little lost from time to time.

With the all star cast such as Michelle Yeoh, Donny Yen and Tony Leung it was surprising to see the characters being somewhat uninteresting. This was pretty much the case for all of the characters, none of them seemed overly alive. Of course, not being able to fully follow the dialog helped make the characters seem less interesting but even then some elements would shine through. So character wise we saw nothing really impressive. Oh we must mentioned this, completely unrelated, there was a lot of silly hats in this movie.

What they missed in the movie they made up with action, there is a good deal of martial arts action during the movie. Some of the scene were very well thought out and pretty cool but the fights themselves were overly fast and filled with bad camera angles. In most of the fight scenes you miss a lot of actual martial arts moves due to the camera angles. It was more flash than actual content. On the positive side there was a lot of action so the movie did not get boring.