Although it poses as a sequel, Saviour of the Soul 2 is not connected to the fine Wu Xia entry Saviour of the Soul (1991) in anything but name (although it does feature a return performance from Andy Lau). The first Saviour of the Soul was a serious entry – if serious is a word that can ever be used in conjunction with Wu Xia cinema. However, the sequel approaches everything as a bizarrely cartoonish level that almost turns into a parody of the whole cycle. There are times Saviour of the Soul 2 is an amazingly silly film – the first quarter hour or so is filled with deliberately over-the-top parodies of martial arts poses and non-sequitirs – the hero and his godson sidekick emerge out of a phone-booth in Superman costumes or conduct ludicrously acrobatic leaps and mount horses in order to travel about a metre. On their journey to the mountain, they head off in diving suits and emerge inside a girl’s bathtub, which she rises from to attack the heroes with a flying scissors attack clad only in soapsuds. The film has no plot whatsoever but the silliness eventually becomes rather entertaining – a pool game conducted with giant-size cues and balls is a gem of deadpan comedic direction.

As always, the martial arts sequences are like nothing in any Western film – mid-air battles dancing along flashing swords or down wind-tunnels of flowing silk to get the energy contained in a kiss; attacks by an army of red jester-outfitted goblins and thugs in flying bat-wings; the fight against an army of boxers who combine fists to form one deadly punch, which the hero dispatches by enlarging his own fist to giant-size and knocking them through trees and into the air.