Devil's Disciples 强剑 (TVB) - Review

The poster and the main cast, minus the veterans.

As always... a spoiler free review.

I was really looking forward to this series and have a favourable view towards most of the cast members so it pains me somewhat to say that this has to be one of the worst TVB series produced this year. Right now, I can't decide if this is as bad or worse than The Brink of Law and the only thing that's majorly in its favour right now is that Devil's Disciples is only 20 episodes long.

This is very disappointing work from Lau Kar Ho (刘家豪) who's The Gentle Crackdown was quite a good watch and is in my opinion one of TVB's best series in the last couple of years. Lau's When Rules Turn Loose was a bit of an iffy watch but benefited from sterling performances from the veterans and very good performances from Patricia Lau Cheuk Kei 劉綽琪 (sadly, no longer with TVB) and Wayne Lai Yiu Cheung 黎耀祥. Although Devil's Disciples included both Patricia Lau and Wayne Lai, poor Patricia's role was so minuscule that even if she was as brilliant as she was in When Rules Turn Loose, she could not save this series.

It is doubly disappointing that Lau wasted a cast which not only boasts the talents of Patricia Lau and the ever reliable Wayne Lai but also included Law Koon Lan 羅冠蘭 and some of TVB's more prominent young talents like Bosco Wong Chung Chak 黃宗澤, Bernice Liu Bik Yi 廖碧兒, Kevin Cheng Ka Wing 鄭嘉穎, Shirley Yeung Sze Kei 楊思琦 and Sharon Chan Man Chi 陳敏之. Terrible scripting, poor direction, flat characterization and bad casting doomed this series almost from the very beginning.

As usual, I won't really go into the synopsis of this series. If you want to read the English synopsis, please click here. There really isn't much of a story in this series. It's pretty much genre stuff and nothing is too hard to guess anyway. Fact is, they pretty much revealed who the main bad guy is in the very first scene anyway so no suspense there and the stupid opening song pretty much reveals who the couples are too. I'm not even one of those people who believes that every series must have surprises and be different and fresh. Just take a look at the very enjoyable Face to Fate. Now Face to Fate doesn't have a storyline that is all that different from other wuxia series but where it does succeed is that its story is tightly told, well paced and the leads are well cast and it is precisely all these things that Devil's Disciples lacks.

Devil's Disciples actually began reasonable well and gave us a few quirky characters who had the potential to be relatively likeable by the end. But by the end of the series, your patience with Mrs Shing (Law Koon Lan) and Shing Kung (Johnson Lee Sze Jit 李思捷), the hero Shing Fung's (Bosco Wong) mother and older brother have probably run quite thin. Initially, I thought that the humour was quite well placed and that this series aspired to be like The Gentle Crackdown in some ways until I figured out that one of the biggest problem with this series is that, unlike The Gentle Crackdown which is a comedy, Devil's Disciples has a lot of serious drama in the series and the physical humour, the cheers and the musical song and dance bits sit very, very, very uncomfortably with the serious portions. Beside the pointless script, it is this uneven tone throughout this series that is one of the series' big failings.


Bosco Wong and Kevin Cheng

It didn't help too that aside from the meandering storytelling and the ill placed comic moments, the executives at TVB decided to cast Kevin Cheng (plays King Lui) and Bernice Liu (plays Pak Tong Chi Lung) in this series. I'll admit right off the bat that I'm not the greatest admirer of Kevin Cheng's acting abilities. Now that is not to say that I don't like him or that he sucks but to me Kevin Cheng is not a versatile actor. He is very good in lighter series and happier roles like the ones he played in Yummy Yummy and Under the Canopy of Love but serious, brooding wuxia hero he is not. Kevin Cheng seemed a little ill at ease in the role and he also didn't seem able to grasp the type of movement and speech patterns required for wuxia series.


Bernice Liu

The lack of understanding of the required movement and speech patterns for the wuxia series is definitely the biggest reason why Bernice Liu is completely inadequate to play the role of the Second Senior Disciple of the Sacred Sword Clan and the daughter of Pak Tong Ngo, master of the Sacred Sword Clan (played by experience wuxia series veteran Eddy Ko Hung 高雄). She lacks the bearing of a proud, confident and powerful heroine who is an important member of the Wulin's most righteous, prominent and influential clan. Let's not talk about the veterans of wuxia like Ada Choi Siu Fun 蔡少芬, Brigitte Lin Qingxia 林青霞, Cheng Pei Pei 鄭佩佩, Sheren Tang Cui Man 鄧萃雯 etc, simply compare Bernice's acting to peers like Tavia Yeung Yee 楊怡 in Face to Fate and Twin of Brothers or Nancy Wu Ding Yan 胡定欣 in the same two series and the difference should be immediately obvious. Bernice Liu is not experienced enough in the wuxia series, or perhaps she's just too Westernise, to grasp the differences required in wuxia, period and modern series. It didn't help too that Bernice Liu was brought up overseas and her Cantonese isn't very strong. She definitely had trouble articulating the more difficult period and wuxia terms in Cantonese which added to her appearing less than capable in this role. Don't get me wrong, I like Bernice Liu and have liked her from as far back as Virtues of Harmony (the period version) and Survivor's Law but there is no denying that she was wrongly cast in this series because currently she just doesn't have enough experience to lead a wuxia series.

I hung on as long as I could before I skipped to the end and then returning to fast forward though episodes 16-18. I jumped to the end thinking that this being a wuxia series about the epic battle between good and evil, that there would be a mother of all battles at the climax of the series but boy was I wrong. Instead, we get an ending which rivals the moronic ending for Square Pegs. The ending was once again a hark back to Lau Kar Ho's more successful series The Gentle Crackdown and we get a lot of silly comedy which grated as what transpired before that was a serious discussion about the merits of letting go of hatred and the death of a major character in the series. In fact, the death of the major character was dealt with as though it was simply an unimportant side-note and it made me mad that the series didn't even end with a big fight and more emotion to justify this death. I felt sorry that this character was needlessly sacrificed since if Lau Kar Ho was going to end this series in such a comic fashion, then it made no sense to have any of the more important characters die or be sad so near the end of this series. It all the more clearly shows just how amateurish Lau Kar Ho's attempt at mixing tones and genres is.

What is also quite unforgiveably bad about this series is the over reliance on computer graphics. Instead of nicely choreographed fights we get CG, CG and more CG and it isn't even great CG. I know CG is expensive and they certainly can't afford CG like the kind we see in Stromriders but that said, the fights scenes use very little real movement and not even a lot of wire-fu. Some credit has to got to Eddy Ko Hung, Wayne Lai and Sharon Chan for making at the very least their fight scenes a little bit more interesting in spite of all the lousy CG in the series.


Sharon Chan

Perhaps the only saving grace in this series is Sharon Chan. I've liked this support actress for quite some time and am glad to see that TVB is giving her B-List roles like the role of Mok Man in this series. She, like Nancy Wu, Leila Tong Ning 唐寧 and to some extent Tavia Yeung really need way more support from TVB. These are most certainly some of their stronger and more versatile actresses and it is a pity that of this lot, not even Tavia Yeung and Leila Tong can say that they've truly led any series.

Sharon Chan is extremely good as Mok Man, the tormented hate-filled leader of the Blood Shadow Clan. Her clan was exterminated years ago by Pak Tong Ngo who lead the "good" clans of the wulin on a crusade to eradicate evil but who actually had an ulterior motive to steal a treasure from the Blood Shadow Clan. Sharon Chan's performance as Mok Man had traces of the brilliance Ada Choi showed as the temperamental and sometimes cruel Bride with White Hair in TVB's The Romance of the White Haired Maiden and if you know me, you'll know that that is one of the highest compliments I can pay to a TVB actress. Sharon Chan's Mok Man was tempestuous, temperamental, proud, cruel and powerful but yet underneath her hate and anger, her Mok Man exhibited pain, sadness and a sense of lost, subtly but surely in her eyes and gestures. It was Mok Man that kept me watching to to the bitter end for without Mok Man, I would have ditched this series by about episode 9 or 10.

In short =) , don't rent this series. Wait for it to be telecast on tv, it's not worth your hard earned money and precious time. And while I felt Sharon Chan was fabulous and the veterans were good as usual, all those reasons are not reason enough to waste both time and money on this series.