I'm sure the title of this newly-made period martial arts saga means something cooler in its original Chinese than in English. Normally, when I see a Netflix series that runs 44 episodes, I keep scrolling, rather than invest that much time. I'm glad to have made this exception. This combines a premise and characters evoking the vintage genre films cranked out in Hong Kong around the 1970s with some of the flights of fancy (literally and figuratively) and opulence of the more familiar (on this side of the Pacific) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fare. The result is a highly bingeable opus that is rather slow and complex, but well worth the time.
The premise is that two brothers are separated at birth when their parents are killed. It occurs in an unspecified era before kung fu had to compete with bullets. One is raised in isolation by women who are at the peak of martial arts powers. The other is rased by a famous gang of thieves. The former grows up to be superb at his craft, but limited by his post-monastic naivete, lack of personality and strict orders to find and kill his sibling to please the "aunts" who raised him. The other is a happy-go-lucky rogue, whose martial skills are questionable, but who thrives on wit and trickery. Neither has any idea that he even has a brother. In their course of their journeys the two meet and become friends and allies, despite learning that they're destined to face the ordered duel to the death at some point.
Costumes, sets and fight choreography are superb - worthy of feature-film productions. The complicated story includes many villains, arcane plots, questionable, shifting alliances and romantic possibilities. As in the old Hong Kong fare, nothing steamy or titillating occurs on camera. The slowness and subtlety are offset somewhat by a healthy dose of comic relief, mainly coming from the brother raised by thieves.
Unlike some series that end seasons with a cliff-hanger," rewarding" your binge effort with a long wait for the next round of episodes, this one does wrap up most, if not all, subplots in a satisfactory manner, while setting the table for a season two. Fans of classic martial arts dramas, laced with humor and fanciful moves, should be pleased with this one. Those turned off by the gory bits won't have to close their eyes much, since the inevitable injuries and deaths are shown with considerable visual restraint.
