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August 27, 2004
Hero
(out of four)
In Hero, director Zhang Yimou puts the "art" in the martial-arts movie, using the deceptively simple story of an unnamed warrior (Jet Li) who confronts a bloodthirsty Chinese king's three deadliest assassins to stage a dazzling action spectacular. For anyone who's ever admired the way Hong Kong cinema elevates the visual language of action filmmaking -- from John Woo's balletic shootouts to the graceful dance-like fight choreography of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- Hero demonstrates the genre in its most purely operatic form, a colorful pageant of texture, motion and character. The movie's slow pace may catch action fans off-guard, but the unhurried rhythm ultimately helps direct the audience's attention towards the physical elegance of Yimou's fight scenes (each reenacted to a different color theme), told and then retold as a ploy to put the movie's nameless hero within sword's reach of his true adversary, the king. In the end, it is the poetry of Hero's images, not the particulars of its story, that are likely to remain imprinted in moviegoers' memories.
Posted by Peter Debruge on