Why Infernal Affairs director’s A Man Called Hero didn’t live up to the hype of his previous martial arts extravaganza The Storm Riders
- Released in 1999, Andrew Lau’s A Man Called Hero followed hot on the heels of his 1998 Hong Kong box-office hit The Storm Riders
- It featured similarly extravagant special effects, but its martial arts story about Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown during the 1920s let it down
Instead of a sequel, Lau elected to make a movie based on Chinese Hero, another long-running comic book series by Ma Wing-shing, whose work had been adapted for The Storm Riders.
The film, titled A Man Called Hero in English, brought back Ekin Cheng Yee-kin from The Storm Riders and used similar digital effects for its martial arts story about Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown during the 1920s.
“The most eagerly awaited Cantonese summer blockbuster lives up to most of the hype,” wrote Post critic Paul Fonoroff in 1999. “A Man Called Hero is a comic book brought to life, its melodramatic story embellished with visual and special effects.”
But the story let it down, he wrote: “The plot, set in New York’s Chinatown between 1913 and 1929, has an epic potential but the surface is barely scratched.”
