A challenging piece of cinema. Definitely not for everyone. The cinematography is breathtaking, and the violence is stomach turning. 8/10

It is an artistically very interesting movie. I would say that the benefit of watching this movie is entirely from the visuals were it excels. Unfortunately after a while the blood-red and, often, bizarre scenes become a bit boring.

The story, well you have it in the movie blurb above. There is not much more to it and it is just used to tie the string of artistic expressions of the director/writer together. This is a quite violent movie. The old cop, Chang, gets more than one opportunity to use various sharp instruments, mostly his sword, on various criminal elements and the effects are frequently shown in all their gory glory.

What about the actors and their performance? Well it is quite good for this type of movie but having said that the acting mostly consists of various people silently staring at each other.

I had quite a bit of difficulty in deciding what rating I should give this movie. If I would go by the visuals only it should be very high but if I would go by the rest of the content it would be rather low. In the end I decided that although I appreciated the artwork I did not really like the movie as a whole that much. Thus it gets 5 out of 10 stars.