YMMV / Detective Dee

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The film seems a fairly normal historical cop-drama until the magic talking deer appears. It's later revealed that the voice came from ventriloquism, which only makes slightly more sense. The upside of this is that the viewer is kept guessing as to whether the Phantom Flame effect is genuinely supernatural or not, given all the other clearly unrealistic stuff that happens.
• Funny Moments: At the end of the second movie, Dee, Shatuo, and Yuichi are invited to a feast by Empress Wu to congratulate them on solving the case. They are offered to drink some Bird's Tongue tea that Empress Wu assures does not contain the parasites, when they all take a drink, Empress Wu says Bring the medicine.
• Moment of Awesome: The second movie has Dee on a horse, in the middle of the ocean, on floating ship wreckage, trying to outrun a Kaiju.
• Narm:
  • The first victim snapping in half when he catches on fire.
  • It's really hard to take the fight between Dee and the CGI deer seriously, especially for anyone who's seen The Ring Two.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Phantom Flame sure qualifies, especially the death of Pei Donglai.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The entire central part of the story consists of Dee and Jing'er awkwardly flirting with each other while investigating some mysterious High priest who may or may not be related to the main plot... while Pei Donglai is making actual progress in uncovering the case by himself. It becomes even more extreme when it turns out that the high priest was a Red Herring all along and that Dee himself deduced so fairly quickly. The whole thing culminates in Jing'er getting assassinated, making the entire subplot fairly pointless.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The movie is fairly pretty, although not a world-beater by any stan...what do you mean, all this was done for only US$13 million?!

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