Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

More of this Feature • Part 2: "The Godfather" of Wuxia  Join the Discussion "I love this movie to death. " Airchinapelo   Related Resources • Crouching Tiger Resources Dozens of links to reviews, articles, fansites, and more. • Crouching Tiger DVD The spectacle looks splendid digitally, and the disc is loaded with special features.

Unless you're Tom Hanks living on some castaway island, you've already read five rave reviews of Ang Lee's spectacular Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. With the exception of the ever-confrontational Village Voice, everybody agrees on this one: it's marvelous entertainment, it's touching, beautiful, exhilarating, and pretty much any other adjective you commonly find screaming at you from the top of the full-page movie ads. In this case, they're all justified. If I were you, I'd stop reading right now and run out to catch the next show. Actually, there's a chance I might stop writing this review so I can go see it again.

Catfight: Yeoh and Ziyi

What's all the hubbub about? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a Wuxia picture, a Chinese genre involving magic warriors, flying monks, and noble swordsmen-- the stuff of badly dubbed Sunday morning matinees. Ang Lee, the director of The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility, and The Ice Storm, says he wouldn't feel like a real director unless he made at least one of the B-pictures he grew up on.

To summarize Crouching Tiger is difficult and somewhat pointless. It's the kind of story that delightfully throws in another twist right when you thought you figured out what was going on. Suffice it to say that it includes legendary swords, hidden monasteries, noble bandits, brides longing for adventure, crooked witches with poison darts, prowling thieves, and not one but two great love stories.

Superbad Swordspeople: Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh

Best of all, of course, are the fights. Yuen Wo-Ping, the martial-arts trickster who brought us The Matrix, is responsible for the butt-kicking action here. Forget Neo, forget the Crispin Glover fight in Charlies' Angels: what you get here is pure, exhilarating joy. By the end of the first rooftop melee between Michelle Yeoh and a masked intruder, I found myself grinning like an imbecile.

The gravity-defying movements are so fast and surprising, and Lee keeps heaping them on so copiously, they leave you giddy with excitement. At a matinee screening full of seniors, people broke into spontaneous applause. This is fighting as dance, fighting as drum solo, fighting as lovemaking, fighting as a battle of wits. It's breathtaking. I could happily watch 90 minutes of non-narrative Ang Lee kung fu.

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