"Tai Chi Zero" is often more distracting than diverting with its everything-goes aesthetic - there are strains of steampunk, manga and silent film comedy, with video-game touches.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 19, 2012

"Tai Chi Zero" is loads of fun to watch, especially a battle in which watermelons, bananas and other fruits and veggies serve as flying weapons.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 19, 2012

A martial-arts adventure with more video-game and comic-book DNA than the traditional kung fu flick, "Tai Chi Zero" is good, if empty-headed, fun.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 19, 2012

Exhausting to watch, Tai Chi Zero is all flash and little substance.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 18, 2012

"Zero" is the first part of a trilogy. Part two, titled "Tai Chi Hero," is due in January. The legend is off to a promising start.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 18, 2012

Essentially a live-action anime, it sweats rivulets of Tarantino-era digital anxiety from all pores-every kick, punch, pan, and zoom exaggerated for maximum impact.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 18, 2012

Fung is enjoying himself so much that he doesn't want the movie to end - and his delight is infectious.

| Oct 18, 2012

Tai Chi Zero, the first film in a planned trilogy, will leave hard-core fight enthusiasts wanting. But it's a droll, pleasant diversion all the same.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 18, 2012

Fast and mostly fun, the movie also seems compulsively too much, throwing everything it can think of at you, lest it fail to entertain.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 18, 2012

For all its playfulness and cameo one-shots ("Lung Siu-lung, '70s kung fu superstar"!), Fung's film represents a thundering dead end.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 18, 2012

The cross-cultural, steampunk, martial arts/comic-book Sino-Anglo mash-up...[is]visually entertaining. But...its considerable charms may prove exhausting before its relatively brief, 95-minute run time is over.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 18, 2012

Give some points to a genre flick whose style mash-up reflects uneasy relations between Asia and the West just as its fracas-intensive plot tries to dramatize them.

| Oct 16, 2012

If director Stephen Fung's frenetic visual style is the Red Bull in this cinematic cocktail, then the dozy plotting is the vodka-leaving you feeling momentarily excited but ultimately narcotized.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 16, 2012

The story's fundamentals are solid, and the battles between this village of kung fu experts and an army of 19th century technophiles are so good that the inevitable sequel (already in the works) will be welcome.

| Original Score: b | Sep 27, 2012

None of this is as enchanting as it wants to be -- despite Fung's energetic mixing of styles and references.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 27, 2012

On the whole, although this is beautifully made, like all these films are or most of them are, very spectacular and elaborate, I'm a bit bored with this sort of film, I must say.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 27, 2012