I’m quite upset to say that I didn’t have the same feelings as the reviewers who have complimented Blind War. I felt like the plot was all over the place, and for a story that should have been about “Point A to Point B,” there were too many detours. Yang Xing’s subplot was so much of a distraction, that it felt like she had a stand alone movie that kept interrupting Andy On’s.

I get that her character is a psychopath because she’s spent most of her life as a victim of human trafficking, (A plot point that was not handled with respect) but her motivations didn’t make sense and kept switching. (Not to mention she doesn’t cover her tracks well)

Andy On’s special abilities seemed very selective. It seems like he adapted to becoming blind simply because he was already a highly trained hard-ass cop, but it was annoying to see him go from detecting where danger is because of the direction a sound comes from, to having incompetent henchmen ambush him at a moment’s notice. It’s like his “powers” kept turning on and off.

The action had some good moments peppered about, but also had a lot of inconsistencies. Andy On’s fight with the big gangster went for longer than it should have and the method he used to beat him was ridiculous with how he takes the time to jump out a window with a rope, go back into the building to tangle the gangster in one end of the rope while the other end was immediately already tied to the elevator.

For a movie that is and hour and forty minutes, it felt much longer with how much the subplots padded out the runtime while taking too long to get to the next action scene.

This should have been a fun film in line with something like Crank, but the constant melodrama and seriousness of a ridiculous plot full of stupid coincidences really bogged the movie down, and of course was made worse with the inappropriate comic relief from the idiot detective. Golden Age HK films may have jumped from melodrama to humor, but many of them did it much better.

No, I don’t think Blind War is terrible. But the amount of problems were hard to ignore. I know John Wick 4 gets too much praise from people who didn’t grow up on worldwide action cinema, but I think Donnie Yen was still the better blind guy. Put down those rocks.

As I mentioned before, it seems like the best “HK styled” Chinese films of recent times are the direct to streaming variety, and I’m OK with that even if they’re using digital muzzle flashes. I like how it looks like this movie plays everything seriously despite the unrealistic premise, and I’m sure Blind War’s charm could rub off on me.

Surprisingly – no! I think the overseas setting (Germany? – still up for debate!) allowed them to circumnavigate the obligatory tapping themselves on the back scene!

Yeah I know what you mean. Unfortunately for the web movie production style I think digital muzzle flares are the most we can hope for when it comes to shootouts (would happily be proved wrong though!), so I look at them as a kind of necessary evil.

I thought the funniest thing about the blooper reel was how annoyed Andy On looks in literally all of the footage he appears in. I wonder if he was just ‘in character’, or would genuinely rather be somewhere else!

That’s a very valid point. While Austria finds itself frequently frustrated at being confused with Australia, here’s some dummy on an Asian cinema website confusing it with Germany (can I use the common language as an excuse? :-P). I’ve edited the review to save others from having to suffer from my geographical incompetence, thanks for calling it our Kiril!