I generally enjoyed the movie, though I found it to be a bit schizophrenic, with some parts of the film being totally different in tone than other parts of the film, though some of that is dictated by the story itself. It just didn't seem to flow for me at times. I thought the bookend was a bit confusing - I think it would have worked fine just starting from the beginning.

Jet Li was good - the action sequences were spectacular. The guy who played his best friend was good too. Some really heart-wrenching moments. One bit I found weird - a Western man was doing the announcing in the ring, and I thought his mouth movements were weird. It appears they had him do his lines in English, then they dubbed them in Mandarin, and then what he actually said was what was in the subtitles. Weird.

I thought the ending was a little confusing.

Oh, and the crying baby (no more than six months old?) in the row down from us was pretty distracting. These particular parents were being incredibly rude by not taking the child out of the theatre. Baby cried on and off for a while, and they tried to calm him/her down, but when it was obvious baby was bored and didn't want to be calmed down, they just continued to try, most of this happening during some of the quiet moments in the film. And during the action sequences, it was pretty loud, so it doesn't surprise me it was disturbing the baby. I finally made a comment about taking the baby out, which they ignored. I didn't notice, but my husband said they then opened a celphone to try to amuse the baby with the bright light - and a man sitting in the row behind them said something to them. Dad finally took the baby and went to sit in the bottom section and then I think ended up in the back of the walkway into the theatre because I could still hear the baby crying periodically, though it was obviously much softer than when they were in the same row.

Buy a frickin' clue - get a babysitter or wait for the DVD.