Hero: Movie Review, DVD Review (2004)

9/16/2007 Posted by Admin

She's still--for now

(Originally published 2004)

Directed by Zhang Yimou, written by Li Feng and Wang Bin, 99 minutes, rated PG-13. In Chinese with English subtitles.

What grabs you in Zhang Yimou's long-awaited, Academy Award-nominated "Hero" isn't the story, which is structured like "Rashomon," recalls "The Emperor and the Assassin," and thus has a whiff of the familiar. What leaps off the screen is Christopher Doyle's astonishing cinematography, the superlative action sequences, and the vivid colors of a world uniting just as it threatens to bust apart.

As in the popular "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the more recent "Kill Bill" series, and the best films of the chopsocky genre, the action in "Hero," which has been sitting on Miramax's shelf for nearly two years, is something to behold - precise and weightless, a tumbling ballet of kicks, flips and whirls.

This is the most expensive movie in Chinese history and it shows, costing a reported $30 million to make. While that figure might seem low by Hollywood standards, consider that "Hero" benefits enormously from sets no studio could afford to buy or authentically create - the landscape and architecture of China, all of which serves as its stunning backdrop.

Set more than 2,000 years ago, the film follows the potential unseating of King of Qin (Chen Daoming), who is working tirelessly to unite China's seven kingdoms under one rule - his own - so he can become China's first-ever emperor.

Naturally, he has his share of detractors, particularly the three working overtime to assassinate him: Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Long Sky (Donnie Yen). To kill them, the king has offered a formidable bounty, with Jet Li's Nameless, a county sheriff, arriving early in the film to explain why he deserves it.

According to him, he has fought and murdered all of the king's enemies, which he outlines to the king in a series of flashbacks.

Uncoiling in a sort of altered consciousness, the movie splinters time, weaving in and out of the past and the present as Nameless recounts his ascension as a master assassin. What he describes is passionate, daring and romantic, stories that might be true or a bald-faced lie. The king knows that Nameless could be there to kill him - so do we - but he's nevertheless intrigued enough to allow Nameless to tell his tales and gradually step within 10 paces of him, which gives the film an edge that's nicely sustained.

"Hero" has too many layers to generate the real heat it needed to be great, and its support of Qin, a tyrant, leaves a bad taste. Still, it does have moments that are visually great, such as a high-flying fight atop still waters, a blazing blast of swordplay amid a mass of swirling autumn leaves, a final scene of loss in a hail of arrows whose power is only matched by the plunge of an unexpected suicide.

Grade: B+

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