It appears to have been made as some sort of promotion around the films, maybe some DVD release around the time, but through various interviews we get a half-decent portrait of the man held back only by what I have to guess are the limited materials around him (Rayns talks a little about this in his interview found on the previous disc). The disc also features a 48-minute 2004 documentary on the inspiration for the films in this series (and many past films), The Legend of Wong Fei-hung. He also shares his contributions around some of the planning that went into his big fight with Li, including how he worked the deadly cloth in there. Here Yen talks about his role, both in terms of his character and the work that went into the fight scenes and shares some stories from the set, including one around a severe injury he received while filming, Tsui looking to get him back quickly. Outside of the second film’s trailer the only supplement on this disc that could be considered specific to the second film is a 16-minute interview with Donnie Yen, recorded in 2012. Supplements are spread across the discs in the set, with most related to the series overall. In all I’m sure fans will be more than pleased. Outside of that, motion is again clean and smooth, the quick action scenes looking sharp. It’s ultimately a minor concern, though, as it doesn’t impact detail all that much, and there’s still a nice film look about the end results onscreen. I was going to put it down to encode initially but it looks different from how grain is rendered in the next three films, so I suspect that maybe there was filtering or some other form of management done during the original restoration or master creation. The digital encode seems okay, though the grain does have an odd texture at times, similar to the first film’s presentation. Restoration work has cleaned up things impressively, only a handful of small, noticeable marks remaining. Black levels are also pretty deep without crushing out detail, and the textures in the shadows are still rendered cleanly. Whites also look more like a warm white, not a heavy yellow, and those blues look blue, not cyan. Colours again have a slightly pasty look to them, leaning a bit warmer as well, but there are some very nice pops of red and blue throughout. Overall the image is sharp and clear, doing an impressive job in rendering the film’s textures and details. This film was restored by the same people behind the first film, Perfect Production in Hong Kong, and the end results for this film look pretty close to how that previous effort came out. The 35mm original camera negative was the source for the restoration. The film is presented in the aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on a dual-layer disc, the 1080p/24hz high-definition encode sourced from a 4K restoration. The second disc in Criterion’s box set Once Upon a Time in China: The Complete Films presents, as one would expect, the second film in the series, Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China II.
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