Part "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" part "Rashomon," Chinese art house auteur Zhang Yimou ("Raise the Red Lantern") gets in on the wire-fu action with the blockbuster "Hero," the subtitled sensation that stormed the American box office last weekend.
Under Yimou's direction, martial arts legend Jet Li gets a workout, slashing, jumping, and flying his way through countless fights, but Yimou is first and foremost an aesthete: the violence remains almost entirely bloodless, and the passion is also missing from the duels. Instead, we get something much more akin to ballet than traditional chop socky.
The story, set over two thousand years ago, involves a group of assassins who are trying to kill a king attempting to unite China with his armies. In the opening sequence, Li (playing a nameless hero) marches past a sea of extras to face the king and tell him how he dispatched his last enemies--Broken Sword, Snow, and Sky. In flashbacks, we see fight after gorgeously coreographed fight. Then, in a move reminiscent of Kurosawa's "Rashomon," the king tells his version of the events, and we see the nameless hero clash with Broken Sword, Snow, and Sky again--and again, until, by the end of the movie, we might be confused about what really happened to the asssassins.
Unlike Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger," which invested a B genre with art house sensibility, "Hero" never quite comes together. The actors, including Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, and Zhang Ziyi, do their best to invest their characters with dignity and grace while they keep delivering deadly blows to one another, but in spite of all the tragedy, they only occasionally manage to generate any kind of emotional tug.
Instead, the lavish beauty of the art design will have to suffice, and it almost does. Yimou shows us things we have never seen before: an arrow's-eye view of a calligraphy school under siege, an autumnal fight among tornadoes of leaves, an airborne duel over a mountain lake, a deadly match in a rainy courtyard, and so forth. Each one of his set pieces is gorgeously photographed, with heaps of slow motion and radiant primary colors, and every single shot of "Hero" is a worthy of a framed poster. But after two hours, the film's relentless beauty becomes numbing, and the plot just barely sustains interest.
