| Review by Jim |
| Plot: In ancient China, a nameless warrior has been granted an audience with the king of Qin, who has made many enemies for trying to unite all of China, for killing three of the Zhao Kingdom's deadliest assassins. The warrior isn't telling the truth, and the both of them exchange in a lot of bullshit about what may or may not have really happened and what defines a hero. Review: First things first, I really don't like "wuxiu" cinema--movies in which the entire populace of China have gained the ability of flight. In my opinion wire kung-fu has been way overdone and just plain looks corny anymore (watch any of the Charlie's Angels movies and you'll see what I mean). The only real type of Hong Kong flicks I like are the John Woo action-fests and retro kung-fu movies. So I had no initial interest in Hero which has been gushed over by the critics. Guess what? Hero is one of those movies where every critic in America blows their wad over it and you, the ticket-payer, suffers because of all of these misleading recommendations. But before I start on the actual review, I'd like to say something in regards to the narrative in Hero being compared to Akira Kurosawa's 1950 classic Rashamon. Yes, the movie is told in flashback and from different perspectives, but while Rashamon uses its flashbacks cleverly, Hero just jumbles its numerous flashbacks so poorly that you'll quickly get confused and annoyed. You see, there are a ton of flashbacks...each one corresponding to a color. So at the end of the film when they'd gone through just about every color in the rainbow, we have so many flashbacks piling on each other that we don't know who's telling what. To me that's just plain sloppy and self-indulgence on the director's part. It felt like running in a big circle with the exact same scene being played out slighly differently and with another color scheme. However, I will give props where props are due, and in my opinion the cinematography was pretty good overall in the movie despite being overused to an absurd level. Everything was picture-esque and had crisp, clear colors. Ancient China has never looked so beautiful in a film, and even when I was bored silly I could at least appreciate the some of the camerawork. So Hero isn't a lot budget or crudely filmed affair. On the negative of the cinematography, the director has a bad habit of ripping off those awkward pauses from samurai flicks for just about every single fight. I'm talking long pauses here, the kind that make you want to check your watch. And lest we forget the colors in which an entire scene would be filmed in nothing but blue, red, green, and so on. That shit hurt my eyes! Then there was the stone cold serious attitude that was taken when such laughably pretentious scenes that were being filmed. The "mind fight" sequence had me laughing my ass off in the theater. What really pissed me off was how deadly serious the movie was with its lousy characters, self-important and jumbled message, and artsy fight sequences. All the characters here are just plain boring despite being composed of China's best and brightest. We have Donnie Yen, Jet Li, and Ziyi Zhang who are all well-known actors yet in Hero they're nothing more than one-dimensional characters who give serious looks and can fight. Dammit, why was everybody so stone-faced even when it came to the most emotional scenes? It really took me out of the flick. One more thing, why is Donnie Yen so under-used anymore? He gets his ass handed to him in a few minutes Hero just like in Highlander: End Game and Blade II. The acting and charcter development in Hero goes as such: two characters exchange in philosophical bullshit about how it's so much better to be complete wusses than fight the tyrannical king, they look moody at each, then they wire-fight for a few minutes. Rinse and repeat. The fight scenes were so underwhelming. None of it feels very interesting and I found myself wanting them to end. It was just a bunch of lackluster swordplay that didn't lead anywhere. Oh, and Jet Li flops around like a big mouth bass in one scene. None of it feels new or interesting, just the same old crap you've seen a billion times before. The last order of business and beef I have with this flick is its message. What exactly is it trying to say? It's better to wuss out so the country can be united even though the ruler might be a completely ruthless dick than to fight for what you believe in? What a polite way of saying to the people of China to not challenge their communist government. "Yeah, we're total assholes, but on the plus the country is being held together!" Okay, maybe that's not what the real message is, but that's what I got from the film. So what, there were a ton of rulers trying to unite China, did that make them all the right rulers because they were trying to unite the country? No. It felt like a bit of a downer, actually. Fighting to right the wrongs in the world isn't as important as unifying China and then building an empire (oh, and lest we forget the part where the king said he was going to conquer other countries, but I guess all that mushy stuff at the end of the movie was supposed to make us forget that). In the end, Hero takes itself way too seriously in its message, action, and tone. The fight sequences and characters were incredibly blah, the message is unclear to say the least, and everything about the movie is so pretentious you'd think it was done by a college film student. The movie isn't a total waste, it did have some cool sets and nifty camerawork, but that was about it. Hero isn't going to really move anyone or entertain for that matter despite its epic scale. So in the immortal words of my brother "The Emporer and the Assassin" was infinitely better. Skip Hero unless you want to see a really watered-down version of Crouching Tiger. |
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| Rating: *1/2 |