Why so much hype?

Fantastic!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The boy Yang Lu Chan (Jayden Yuan) was born with a little fleshy horn on his forehead and is called The Freak and is humiliated and rejected by the other boys in his village. However, when the horn is touched, he turns into an eminent kung fu warrior. When his beloved mother dies, he follows his Master Lao Zhao (Hark-On Fung) that is the leader of the Divine Truth army that fights the emperor army. However, every time that Yang fight, his horn gets darker and Master Dong (Siu-Lung Leung) tells that if it gets black, he will die. When the emperor army attacks the Divine Truth, Dong is deadly injured and he advises Yang to travel to the Chen Village to seek out Master Chen Chang Xing (Tony Leung Ka Fai) and learn the martial art Tai Chi that would provide energy to him to survive. However, the Master Chen is in a retreat and the Chen villagers refuse to teach the technique to outsiders. Yang meets Chen's daughter Chen Yu Niang (Angelababy) and she successively beats up on him trying to force Yang to give up. But a laborer suggests Yang to learn the Tai Chi movements while she beats him. Meanwhile, Yu Niang's former boyfriend Fang Zi Jing (Eddie Peng), who was born in the village but has studied in Europe, returns to Chen Village expecting to convince the locals to allow building a railroad across their land. His proposal is rejected and he returns with the railroad representative Claire Heathrow (Mandy Lieu) in a lethal machine with British soldiers to destroy the Chen Village. Yang believes that if he becomes a hero saving the village, the locals will teach him Tai Chi."Tai Chi 0" is a funny adventure that uses the ancient Chinese tradition in the format of a video game. The good thing is that despite the difference of cultures, the story is highly entertaining and is worthwhile watching this movie. The bad thing is that the movie is to be continued. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Mestre da Guerra" ("The Master of the War")

The movie starts well (for a few minutes only) but it quickly becomes an accumulation of short sequences which leave no place to any serious story/ carachter development, while the action scenes are shoot with what I'd call a below average skill level (the camera shake, turn quickly into many directions but you get no feeling of actually watching peoples fighting together).also, if you didn't watch yet the first episode, Tai Chi Hero, be aware the the directors and producers had no concern at all about you, as the story line is unfolding hectically without any serious recall of what happens in the previous movie, even if these previous events do affect the plot from the start of this new episode.the concept looked interesting on the paper, but the outcome is weak, below average and headache to watch kung fu movie.

Utter crap. Probably one of the worst kung fu movies I've ever seen. It wouldn't be so bad if the story sucked but the fights were awesome or something, but it wasn't even that. The story sucked and the fights sucked! Usually kung fu movies tend to have low budgets and don't have good stories anyways, so they rely on the fight scenes being exceptional in every way. That's why the fight scenes in kung fu movies tend to have super fun fights that try to out-do the previous movies in scope, length, and ridiculousness; and usually they achieve all that without wire-fu or CGI, that's what makes kung fu movies so much fun. But Tai Chi Zero has none of that. I don't know what Stephen Fung was doing, but he CGI'd the crap out of the movie. I do admit that he has an interesting visual flair, but it's really nothing special, and in all honesty, all the CGI hocus pocus is just a diversion to distract you from noticing just how bad this movie is.

China is changing. Because film is a major force for shaping the national character, among the most interesting things these days, is watching the Chinese scramble to reinvent (post Mao) who they are and how they fit in the modern world.Their newly-emerging documentary school chronicling the industrial rise of China is one aspect of this, and seems to have produced some pretty good pieces.Their tried and tested practice though, meant both for internal consumption and abroad, is manufactured postcards of harmony (moral, spiritual), usually anchored in fabled history, usually in martial arts.We saw that with the faddish promotion of qigong in the 90's, the Wong Fei Hung films and Zhang's Hero. We saw it again a few years ago with Yip Man. This juvenile mishmash is a tai chi showreel for the twitter generation reared on blockbuster steroids. It is another 'origins' story of martial arts, that of Yang-style taijichuan. And because the filmmaker probably felt that to his teenage audience the mid-1800's would seem like forever ago, he goes crazy on myth and movie nonsense, but careful not to upset state officials. This leads to a pretty boneheaded product. Once more, Chinese 'purity' is contrasted with encroaching Western civilization. Westerners standing in for capitalism and technology are portrayed as evil and corrupting, while the actual film is made by copying what is currently trending in the capitalist blockbuster market.The steampunk revisionism of a huge metallic beast threatening the old way of life is from Wild Wild West. The notion of a small community where everyone is a martial arts expert is from Kung Fu Hustle (and of course the story of Chen Jia Gou). The obvious video game humor is from Scott Pilgrim. The wire-fu is Sammo Hung's and a longtime staple of cinematic wushu via HK. The speed-ramps of the opening battle are from 300, with other perspectives borrowed from Scott and recent John Woo.This is all echoed inside the film as the young boxer learning taijichuan by imitating the moves.As someone who practices in the Yang-style, I advise you to steer clear of this. It has no sincerity or soul. What is of some interest, is noting the irony of this film in the current climate of aggressively expansive Chinese capitalism. Or how the Kung Fu Panda franchise is widely celebrated there.Meanwhile, Chinese martial arts have gone from their original mix and match roots of outlaw boxing, to collective standardization in the communist years, to government-promoted sport, to exhibition and health therapy. Having proved inadequate in the modern mixed martial arts world, the current move is away from the forced harmony of (usually fabricated) tradition and towards the practical cross-training system of sanda/sanshou, which in turn emulates several foreign styles.