A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 6, 2011.
Tony Ching – the director of the original Chinese Ghost Story (1987) – is in fine form with this spectacular fantasy-adventure about two “snake demons” who change into beautiful women and set out to explore the human world. If this premise sounds familiar, it's because it's taken from an ancient legend that has been filmed many times before – perhaps most famously in the Maggie Cheung vehicle Green Snake (1993), directed by Ching's sometime collaborator Tsui Hark.
Here the focus is on White Snake (Eva Huang) and her love for Xu Xian (Raymond Lam), a mortal man she saves from drowning. When she kisses him underwater, they exchange “vital essences,” binding them together forever – a plot point explained to us later by a talking rabbit voiced by Miriam Yeung.
Yes, it's that kind of movie. There are fox demons who slip out of bamboo stems, malevolent flying spirit roots, and an outlandish meet-the-family sequence that easily betters the one in Twilight (2008). The story seems ready-made for the era of advanced digital effects, which allow landscapes as well as characters to transform from moment to moment; it's no wonder that Jet Li gets little chance to show off his reality-based martial arts skills as the villain of the piece, a narrow-minded monk.
White Snake and her equally imperious sister (Charlene Choi) are much more fun to be around. Though the film is not short on disturbing Freudian imagery, its view of demons is refreshingly free of moral judgement.
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