Detective Dee

One of modern Hong Kong cinema's first and foremost action-adventure directors has roared back into commercial favour with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. It could become a major franchise for Tsui Hark, who has directed close to 50 movies (since The Butterfly Murders in 1979), and produced many more for both the cinema and TV.

Detective Dee is a fictional character based on a real 7th-Century magistrate in the court of Tang Dynasty ruler Wu Zetian, China's first and only female emperor. Under the name of Judge Dee, he's the hero of a series of 17 novels written by Robert van Gulik, a Dutch scholar in Oriental languages and diplomat (serving as ambassador to Japan and Korea when he died in 1967).

Tsui's film credits a novel about Detective Dee by Lin Qianyu. The screenplay was written by Jialu Zhang, working with Taiwanese veteran Kuo-fu Chen; they'd also collaborated on the adaptation of The Message, a 20th-Century Sino-Japanese espionage thriller that gained high ratings the previous year (2009)

Andy Lau plays the outcast magistrate brought back to court to solve the deadly self-combustions of two courtiers helping to prepare the coronation of Empress Wu. Tsui's trademark style of quick cuts, overlapping dialogue and fast action ensures that Lau's usual brooding glare and over-acted facial reactions provide minimal distraction. By contrast, Carina Lau (back on screen after a four-year break) is credibly dead-panned and imposing as the Empress.

There's the usual cast of hundreds of extras, palatial settings and martial artistry (designed and directed inventively by Sammo Hung, with tributes to tree-hopping, pole-leaping, high-flying and other classic movie acrobatics) in this grandly old-fashioned historical romp. The key supporting roles of a female warrior (Bingbing Li, The Message) and an albino courtier (Chao Deng, award-winning lead in Assembly) are well played, and Tony Leung (the tall one) turns in a customary screen-stealing growling performance as the one-handed supervisor of construction for a giant Buddhist statue. That's the movie's major scenic attraction, reminiscent of massive big-screen stages from Indy Jones or Lara Croft sagas (and Tsui's own past spectacular epics).