Critical Outcast

DVD Review. Anna in Kung Fu Land
Sound like something you want to see? It should, it's a funny martial arts comedy from Hong Kong starring Ekin Cheng and Miriam Yeung.

The story concerns Ken, an advertising executive who finds himself in charge of putting together a martial arts competition to promote a new sports drink. The problem is that in order to get the contest off the ground, he must get the Shaolin Temple to enter. Of course this complicates matters as Ken must travel to Japan to encourage a former temple master to return to Hong Kong to compete. The Master in turn sends his beautiful daughter, Anna, to represent him. This leads to more problems as Ken falls for Anna, despite having a girlfriend. Meanwhile, the competition rages on and Anna splits her concentration between Ken, the competition, and wanting to be a movie star.

The movie is a lot of fun, peppered with a lot of whimsical humor, sight gags, and fast paced action. It's not without its cliches though, you've seen movies like this many times before in American cinema. But that isn't a problem here, there is enough fun in this movie to make you forget all about how familiar the story is. Ekin Cheng is good as Ken, Miriam Yeung is adorable as Anna.

Video: Strange thing happened when I played this, using my Cyberhome 300 the disk played full-frame, despite being labeled widescreen. I noticed it right away, the framing looked awful. I then popped it into my PC and found that it played fine in widescreen, not sure what the problem was. Anyway, the transfer does look good, good color saturation, only problem is that it appeared a bit soft. Better than what I usually see from Tai Seng.

Audio: Presented in its original language, Cantonese, the track is unspectacular but perfectly clear with good levels.

Extras: There aren't many extras, there is the teaser and full trailers, text filmographies of the two primary stars, and a short making of featurette. The trailers are presented full frame with no subs. The featurette is of the fluffy variety, but it was fun to see some of the outtakes, and as a bonus it is subtitled in English!

Overall: Not much on the extras side, but the movie was a blast. If you have not been introduced to the wonderful world of Asian cinema, this would be a decent place to start if you like comedies! Good transfer, fun movie, check it out.
Recommended.

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