cmovie: Moon Warriors
Moon Warriors is a 90s Hong Kong movie that is considerably less cracky than most of the other 80s and 90s Hong Kong movies I've been watching.
In it, Andy Lau plays a fisherman who also happens to be a kung fu expert. How a fisherman who has apparently never or at least rarely left his small village or had much contact with other fighters is never explained. After all, the only use he can find for his kung fu skills is impressive methods of bamboo cutting. He also has a pet whale. This is a significant plot point. He likes to ride his pet whale and but on acrobatic displays they learned from Shammoo, set to rousing wuxia music.
Yes, I did say it was less cracky than the others. Really, that's the main source of crack. unless you count the villain introducing himself by punishing failure with decapitation by bowstring.
Anyway, the kung fu fisherman is off practicing his kung fu bamboo cutting skills when he goes to help a dude in a fight. Turns out the dude is actually the rightful king, on the run from his evil brother. Since the most trustworthy person in wuxia is always the guy you met five minutes ago, the king asks the kungfu fisherman to go fetch his fiancee (Anita Mui) from the neighboring kingdom before evil brother's assassins get her. Naturally, the princess and the kungfu fisherman fall in forbidden love on their roadtrip. They romantically bond over bunnies in a field of flowers, and engaged is some gender-trope reversal by having her carry him on her back through the forest after he's wounded.
Naturally, the king's beautiful advisor (Maggie Cheung) is actually a spy-and-soon-to-be-assassin for the evil brother. Naturally, she's also in love with the king. (Thankfully, this is not a movie in which a seemingly intelligent person has absolute and inexplicable loyalty to an evil person/organization that makes you scratch your head and go "but WHY do you stay loyal and keep doing things?" until the very end.)
I didn't particularly care for the end or think it was the necessary ending for the plot, but this was a pretty good movie otherwise.