So here's the situation, as shown in A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandora's Box...when we last left Joker (Hong Kong's king of comedy, Stephen Chow), he had been accidentally flung 500 years back in time thanks to the power of the mystical talisman known as the Pandora's Box. See, Joker had been trying to go back only a few minutes in time to save his new love Jing Jing (Karen Mok), who had committed suicide. See, Jing Jing killed herself when she had been told by her sister, the Spider Devil ("Yammie Nam" Lam Kit-Ying), that the Spider Devil herself had had a baby with Joker. See, the Spider Devil was trying to sexually assault Joker by using energy beams from her eyeballs but instead wound up shooting Joker's pal, the Assistant Master (Ng Man-Tat), and so the Spider Devil's rapid pregnancy resulted in the birth of none other than the reincarnated Longevity Monk. See, the Longevity Monk (Law Kar-Ying) was destined to meet the Monkey King in the area so that they could complete their mission to go to India to get holy scriptures that would enlighten mankind. See, the Monkey King himself was also reincarnated into the bandit leader now known as Joker but Joker didn't realize that at first so he tried to trick Jing Jing (before she fell for him) and the Spider Devil into believing that he was the Monkey King so he could escape their clutches. See, even though Joker is really the reincarnation of the Monkey King, he can't regain the powers of the Monkey until he finds the person who'll give him three marks on his feet. And in the middle of all this somewhere, the Monkey King's brother-in-law, the powerful devil known as King Bull, is searching for the Longevity Monk himself so all the devils can feast on his flesh. See, once one eats the flesh of the Longevity Monk, they become immortal. Also, the Monkey King and King Bull aren't on good terms since, 500 years earlier (which is where Joker is now), the Monkey had an affair with the Bull's wife. That more or less brings us up to A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella. Now on to the confusing stuff...

This movie opens much like the last: a woman travels alone through the desert. This time, the woman is Zixia (Athena Chu from Supercop 2 and Wong Jing's Conman series), a rather bright and spunky person for an immortal. She's on her way to make her new home in a cave (don't ask me why) and she runs into The Four Kings from the Nantian Gate and the Erlang God. These bumblers are looking for Zixia and her sister, Lin Qingxia, because the two were "the lampwick in the lamp of Buddha" and they left Heaven without permission. Moreover, they serve to inform the audience that Zixia carries a magic sword that can only be unsheathed by either Zixia herself or the man predestined by God himself to be her true love. What Mr. Erlang and his Nantian buddies don't like is the possibility that Zixia's true love will turn out to be a devil, which would make all of these immortals look like laughingstocks. Zixia doesn't take crap like this so she beats them all up in a Ching Siu-Tung hoedown using the time-honored wuxia trick of waving her sword in mid-air, causing her opponents' weapons to be sliced in two without her ever having physically touched them in the slightest.

This is where we run into Joker, standing in front of the Waterfall Cave, bewildered that nothing around him looks familiar. Zixia crosses his path and matter of factly tells him that everything in the immediate area now belongs to her, including Joker himself. She brands him by magically making three dot marks on his feet (aha!) and takes the Pandora's Box from him. Joker is not amused with her or this Monkey King stuff as all he wants to do is grab the Box and use its powers of time travel to return to 500 years in the future to reunite with Jing Jing, that Chinese zombie bundle o' love. But in the meantime, Joker has to be content with being Zixia's human pet. While living with her, he learns that, in a previous life, she and her sister constantly fought and were punished by the gods by both being forced to live in the same body. It seems that during the day, the sweet, upbeat Zixia is in control and, at night, the b*tchy Lin Qingxia is running the whole milk pony.

To make a long story short, Joker pulls the magic sword from Zixia's sheath and it becomes clear that the two are meant to be together. So now Joker has to deal with being torn between 1) his original love, Jing Jing, 2) his fated love, Zixia, and 3) his destiny as the Monkey King. If Joker had to glean the plot of his films from the English subtitles, he'd never be able to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do.

Which brings me to my first gripe about A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: the subtitles can kill you here, more so than in the first film. They flash by so quickly in one scene that Joker's plot to deceive Lin Qingxia by trying to convince her that he is going to kill Zixia, even though he really isn't, is rendered incomprehensible. And that's if you buy the idea that a man can kill the sister of a woman who actually lives in the same body as the woman herself.

In addition to the obtuse subtitling, there just plain needs to be more old fashioned exposition. The fact that Zixia & Lin Qingxia are each in control of their singular body at different times of the day isn't explained so much as implied and, with all the other things to keep track of, that's laborious. Especially when, halfway through the film, a magical spell gone awry switches the minds and bodies of 4 different characters, including Zixia's/Lin Qingxia's. See, Joker and his two companions, Pigsy and Sandy, are battling the scorned woman Xiang Xiang, who has stabbed Zixia. So far, so good. But then Xiang Xiang swaps the bodies and minds of Pigsy and Zixia with each other before accidentally swapping her own mind with the body of Sandy's and Sandy's mind into her own body. But wait! This brawl took place at night so it wasn't Zixia's mind that was placed into Pigsy's body, it was Lin Qingxia's! When they awaken the next morning, it turns out that Zixia's mind now shares her body with Pigsy's mind the way she used to with Lin Qingxia's mind and that Lin Qingxia's mind, and not Zixia's mind, is the one that now resides in Pigsy's body. Now if this weren't bad enough, they see fit to pull yet another swap while trying to resolve this first one towards the end of the film. See, a dog interferes with the final swap and so while almost everyone gets their bodies back, the dog gets Xiang Xiang's mind, which was in Sandy's body, and Xiang Xiang's body gets Lin Qingxia's mind, which was in Pigsy's body. Are you following all that? Do you even remember who the f*ck Xiang Xiang or Lin Qingxia are to begin with? Hell no! And you're just reading a review of this movie, never mind going out to see the actual film!

And then you have the fact that Joker lied to Lin Qingxia by telling her that he is in fact not Joker but Broker, his own twin brother (because he's trying to trick her to help Zixia). When she says he must be joking, he then concocts another lie by telling her that his brother is Qin Han and that he is actually called Qin Xianglin. So Qingxia spends the rest of the movie referring to Joker as Qin Xianglin. It's suppose to help you distinguish Zixia from Lin Qingxia, since they both share the same body and thus look exactly the same, but it's just yet another overly complicated part of the plot to keep track of. People who aren't following along carefully will wonder why one single character is being called by two or three different names at various points in the movie. The character of Lin Qingxia could be dropped from the film altogether and half the problems with the story would be immediately solved.

This gaggle of mind-bending plot twists were probably writer/director Jeff Lau's way of trying to create the illusion of depth in this epic two-part movie of his but hell if he couldn't have created a much better film if he just streamlined things more. There's no excuse for all of that when you already have all the baggage from the first A Chinese Odyssey film to keep track of. Combined, it's almost enough to make you scream. Even the character of Joker seems to parody the labyrinthine architecture of the plot by trying to explain it all in the space of 90 seconds to the past version of Jing Jing (who doesn't remember Joker as the future version would because she hasn't met him yet).

That's not to say that there's nothing worth seeing here. You eventually start to realize that the two A Chinese Odyssey movies form a Mobius Loop, with references in one film to things that happened in the other. You could almost watch them in any order if not for the epilogue in this second one. There's also some delightfully surreal scenes, such as when characters shrink and fly into the bodies of other people in order to speak to their veiny, pumping hearts. King Bull walks away with some of the best one-shot lines in the film once again with classics like "B*tch, don't hit that b*tch!", in reference to a woman getting into a fight with his wife. And, for some reason, Law Kar-Ying's Longevity Monk feels the need to convince Joker to live up to his destiny by serenading him with a Cantonese rendition of The Platters' "Only You"! Finally, the end of the film is surprisingly heartfelt even though it seems to defy logic. But, since Eastern philosophies are often viewed as using anti-logic, I guess it all works out.

Stephen Chow was rumored to have had a copy of Ace Ventura on hand while filming A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella and it shows. When the Monkey King finally makes his reappearance, he stops an entire army of soldiers by farting at them and then doing a few victorious pelvic thrusts. Is this the Monkey King everyone was expecting? Apparently so, as both Pandora's Box and Cinderella are used for study at Beijing University's Social & Cultural Studies program.

I hear there's actually a version of A Chinese Odyssey in which both films are edited together into a single movie. The masochists among you might want to track that one down. As for me, I'll be putting this film far, far behind me. Making sense of it all made my head throb. Or maybe that's just sleep deprivation getting to me. One of those.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD