The Storm Warriors - 風雲II - 風雲2

The Storm Warriors (風雲II/風雲2) is 2009 film out of Hong Kong. The movie stars Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng. The supporting cast include Simon Yam, Charlene Choi, Nicholas Tse, Tiffany Tang Yan, and Kenny Ho. The movie is a sequel to the 1998 film, Storm Riders.

The movie starts with the capture of Nameless, Storm, and many other jiang hu warriors. They are captured by Lord Godless and his son, Heart. However, many of them do make an escape. Lord Godless has also been given all power by the emperor. Nameless and Lord Godless have a intense fight, but Nameless is fighting hurt and cannot defeat Godless. They all escape and Godless's men start to look for them. Wind, who was not captured, comes and aids in their escape.

After they escaped, Storm and Wind are given instructions by Nameless to seek out Lord Wicked for help. Once there, Wind is chosen by Lord Wicked to become one with a wicked demon power. Storm is than trained by Nameless.

Once Storm and Wind are trained in their arts, they go after Lord Godless and defeat him. But Wind's no longer himself, but possessed by the wicked demon eye. Storm and Wind than go at it. They fight to a standstill, but the cliff around them crumbles and Storm finally cuts the demon eye to restore Wind. But Storm falls to his demise off the cliff.



How can the sequel match the original, produced more than ten years after the original, to live up to the hype? You can't, so you just go with the flow. The movie starts off in a confusing place. How did Lord Godless capture all these heroes? Why did they escape so easily? But to the credit of the movie, it says, "forget the story, bring on the fighting". The movie is seriously 75% fighting. Swordplay fantasy fighting. CGI, slow mo, "chi" all thrown in there for good measure.

What should you expect, you should expect a film that says "to hell with character development" and say yes to "computer style fighting". This is not your Jet Li style wuxia film, but a 2009 CGI extravaganza.

I never did read the comics so I am not all that familiar with all the characters of the story, but if you watched Storm Rider: Clash of Evils (風雲決), some of the plot points are also used from there.