Review of Once Upon a Time in China and America

Introduction

After watching a fair number of DVDs over the last year, there have been some high-points (Terminator 2 Ultimate Edition, dts soundtrack), and also some low points. This disc is unfortunately one of those low points.

The plot is outlined above so I won`t go into that. Let`s just get on with this travesty of a disc.

Video

There are in fact 2 versions of the film available here, due to differing soundtracks (I`ll go into those in the next section).

Version 1 starts out as 2.35:1 anamorphic, and then slips into 1.85:1 anamorphic. So far so good ? No, so far so bad. The 1.85:1 appears to be a cropped version of the 2.35:1 print, so you`re missing some information at the sides of the picture ! Aarrggghhh!!!

Ok, so on to version 2. This looks like 2.35:1 non-anamorphic (I`m not 100% convinced, but it`s pretty close to that). So you have to zoom in on your TV. Not too criminal, until you spot the burnt-in subtitles on the print. And they are very small. Even on a 32" widescreen, from a reasonable distance they can be quite hard to make out. Very poor.

Both versions are also not of the highest quality, the prints don`t appear to have been cleaned up, lots of sparklies and other blemishes, and it`s like watching a bad VHS at times.

Audio

As I mentioned there are two versions of the film. Version 1 contains a DD5.1 soundtrack. Good ? No, bad again. It`s not a very good remix of the original track, and worst of all, it`s dubbed in English and sounds terrible. I hate watching dubbed versions of films. Far better to have the original language plus subtitles. With a dub, you lose quite a lot from the film I feel.

Version two cointains the "original Cantonese/english soundtrack". It is presented in DD2.0. It`s not bad, and certainly better than the nasty dubbed version, but it`s still not ideal.

There is a Mandarin soundtrack available on other versions of this disc (e.g. the Carnival R0 version that you can buy from Amazon.com).

Features

If you`re still even remotely interested in this disc at this point, you`ll be pleased to know that there are quite a few extras here.

There`s a behind-the-scenes documentary, which is better than the usual studio fluff, an English trailer (more evil dubbing) and a Cantonese trailer. There are also filmographies, a stills gallery and some information about Wong Fei-Hung.

Conclusion

This really is a travesty of a disc. It had the opportunity to become the reference disc for the film as most of the other versions that exist around the world suffer from problems of one form or another (and there are about 5 other versions of this disc).

But this opportunity was sadly missed. Two pretty bad prints on the disc, a nasty dub, tiny burnt-in subtitles, and cropped presentation.

Scour the world for other copies of this disc if you want to own this film. The film itself is not the greatest, there are some good moments in it, some laughs, some good fight scenes. But the other films in this series are probably better.

I`m afraid I can`t recommend that you rent or buy this. Avoid it, and hopefully they won`t make another disc like this.