OK...the 3 handsome male leads, one being the tragically departed leslie cheung, the 2nd being andy lau and in the 2nd half of the movie a very young korean superstar jung woo sung and in my personal opinion, they have never looked better.

love found, love lost and love shunned...rousing and heartbreaking at the same time with some very good action pieces involved. one of the best movies of the mid to late nineties.

andy lau has never looked better, that pencil thin mustache that he acquires really makes him stand out.

this movie is actually a reworking of a long television series of the early 80's which made chow yun fat a superstar. the plots been changed majorly although the 2 main male leads kept the same names as in the TV series.

the story takes place in 1930's shanghai pre-world war 2 and has a lot of subplots involving turncoats working for the Japanese who are major gangsters in shanghai, Chinese patriots and just plain gangsters vying for power and also the corrupt cops who patrol shanghai who sell themselves to the highest bidder regardless.

heartbreaking story of two brothers by action, who take over shanghais criminal underworld and the misunderstanding over a woman who comes between them and the bloodshed that ensues.

this movie gets a very strong recommendation to watch...from me so if you are a fan of hong kong cinema its a don't miss.

This movie to me was bit boring. Not because it doesn't have lot of action, but something about it was awkward, forced and slow paced. Maybe for people who're familiar with the plot and the culture this movie hits the mark, but for someone who has no preconceived notion or expectation, it's who cares from start to finish. These guy's problems and issues are so remote, and their machismo so utterly stupid, that I felt like saying, if you want to insist on being so stupid, be my guest.

If this is the classic way they made movies, I'm glad that it's not made this way anymore. Each scene was so boring. There wasn't anything to pull you in to the story.

What happened in the end happened but again it was who cares. If they're that bull headed, it would have happened sooner or later. Yeah, these guys had no brains whatsoever. And they were supposed to be a leader in their respective society.

I'm a fan of Andy Lau, but this movie didn't show his character at all. Everybody did a real wooden acting that added to the yawn. No, this is not a film noir, they didn't flesh out the characters and the story, and the flat mood went from start to finish.

Not recommended unless you're familiar with how this story goes, and watching it as a follow up to where the TV series left off, or just watching it for Leslie Chung (and Andy Lau).

This is one of the movies that Tsui Hark's had his hands in, and when that happens, one can expect a pretty good movie. Tsui Hark is one of Hong Kong's most influential producer/directors, and there is very little that he has not been involved in nor who he has worked with. Many of his movies are of high quality and Shanghai Grand is no exception.

The movie is about three people, Ding Lik, Chung Chung Fey, and Hui Kueng. It opens with Kueng on a boat captured by Japanese and he manages to escape where he is washed ashore in Shanghai and found by Ding Lik, a dogs body for the local crime gang. When Lik sees the girl he likes, Fey, kidnapped by the local gang, he intervenes and earns himself the gang's enmity.

The plot itself is complicated, but what it does is that it examines the lives of these three people and how they have become interwoven. We watch the rise of Ding Lik, and we what Hui Kueng try to hang on to his life as he has enemies everywhere. I was not really sure who Hui was, but the cover of the video says that he was a Taiwanese spy in the Japanese Army (the movie is set in the 1930's) and that the Japanese are chasing him.

Shanghai Grand is really a character study in these three people, much like the Killer is a character study as well. The difference here is that the lives of the main characters are heavily intertwined in a way that I won't fully explain least I spoil some parts of the movie. What I can say is that it is a tragedy, as are a lot of non-American movies (and some American movies are quite tragic, but not all of them).