1/5 WHAT
  by ribcage (Lantana, Florida United States)
The Tiger Blade, in its first five minutes, began with promise. It opens up with a frenzied shoot-out in a hotel room that really grabbed me. The trouble is, as soon as the scene ended, the film loosened its grip abruptly and let me fall flat on my face.

My biggest complaint is as follows:

The entire advertised premise of the movie--that of a hero using a legendary magical blade (THE TIGER BLADE!!) to defeat otherwise invincible enemies--is almost ENTIRELY non-existent. Seriously, this sword gets about five minutes of screen time. Four and a half minutes (if that, honestly) are taken in retrieving it, then there's about two fifteen second fight sequences with it. Okay, so I'm not counting the four or so times it's mentioned in dialogue, pushing it to a nice round five minutes and five seconds of mention in the entire film that IT'S NAMED AFTER!

The TIGER BLADE of the title is barely in this movie, and what's more it's COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY to be there in the first place!

The story boils down to this. A freedom fighter escapes from prison to act out a plan that will help him support his cause back home. Some dudes working for the government want to stop him.

There were also more subplots than I could keep up with, characters and names kept popping in and out of the story and dialogue, and basically if I attempt to make sense of ANYTHING in this movie I simply CAN'T.

And why bother including this TIGER BLADE scenario if ONLY ONE ENEMY IS GOING TO ACTUALLY DIE FROM THE SWORD? I'm sorry, I'm really hung up on this point. So I'll move on.

The action, outside of that opening gun battle, was completely uninspired too. Typical kung fu, jumping around, dodging, blocking, kicking, etc. There was a very creative GO-KART chase on a highway moving around semi-truck trailers and such which would fit great in a Stephen Chow film, but this was near the end of The Tiger Blade and there had been no concessions to any kind of comedy up to this point so I just have no idea what anyone working on this film was thinking.

The Tiger Blade was a completely unfocused film in every way. It's rare that I get fired up over a bad film, but being lied to in the premise has really got me going. I watched this movie expecting an action film with a mystic twist full of strange enemies and over the top action. Instead I got a mishmash of a cop film with a bunch of extraneous nonsense and garbage tacked onto with a mere MENTION of mysticism which somehow earned its way into the forefront of the film's advertisement even right down to its title.

Even if it had been titled correctly, and if the bit about the sword hadn't been embellished to make it seem as if it actually comprised the entire movie, The Tiger Blade would have still been awful. I just wouldn't have been tricked into watching it.