If the sequel to an indisputable modern classic and all-time great of the action genre that won three Academy Awards – especially one starring freshly-minted Best Actress winner Michelle Yeoh and John Wick: Chapter 4 ass-kicker Donnie Yen – was announced today, it would be deemed as must-see. However, nobody really seemed to care when Netflix rolled out Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny back in February of 2016.
Ang Lee’s first installment was a breathtaking spectacle that helped popularize wuxia among modern audiences, and it would go on to earn $214 million at the box office on a $17 million budget, before landing Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, and and Best Original Score in amongst 10 total nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Fast forward a decade and a half, though, and the response to the follow-up could generously be described as apathetic. A 20 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 36 percent audience approval rating is quite simply awful for a blockbuster martial arts epic that already had plenty of weight on its shoulders in even attempting to live up to the legacy of its predecessor, and you’d be entirely forgiven for even forgetting that Sword of Destiny even existed.
That being said, plenty of subscribers have suddenly remembered that it really is a thing, seeing as FlixPatrol has outed the Crouching Tiger sequel as one of the platform’s current top-viewed films. There are a voluminous amount of second chapters, sequels, and successors that fail to justify their own need to be realized, and a continuation of the incredible 2000 masterpiece was always fighting an uphill battle to ensure that it wasn’t one of them, a task it ultimately failed.