Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings (Di Renjie zhi Sidatianwang) [Sub: Eng]

Dee is invariably the most sane, grounded person in every scene, though once it's time to bust out the wireworks, he can leap from rafter to rafter with the best of them. It's the movie that never takes flight.

The Hong Kong genre maestro's childlike imagination and technical inventiveness seems inexhaustible.

You will never have to wait long before ninjas strike, a gigantic eyeball demon attacks, or a monster's blood rains from the sky and transforms into flower petals in midair.

Four Heavenly Kings is more coherent than Demons Strike Back, and better in just about every way than Dunjia, and its effects are as imaginative as anything in cinema today...

The film's visual imagination is boggling and exhilaratingly strange.

Many decisions - including the title, which bears only a glancing relation to any part of the plot - seem half-baked at best.

The-X-Files-meets-Hardy-Boys vibe of the earlier films has been watered down and in fact, The Four Heavenly Kings in the title does not refer to a central mystery but is almost incidental to the plot.

The energy is undeniable, especially when delivered via giant Taoist albino gorilla, and the creaky effects have an endearing artisanal quality that feels like a Zu Warriors throwback.