120 minutes you'll wish you'd spent elsewhere

Rating: 4/10 (6 December 2002)

It seems the worst thing you can do is trust the enthusiastic reviews and the unbelievably overblown hype some titles - CTHD included - enjoy in abundance.
I'm not much of a reviewer myself - words would fail me had I tried to describe in detail how bad this movie is. It's not the flying thing, that was actually amusing, not annoying. The fight scenes themselves were fairly average - still, I enjoyed them. At least they helped me stay awake.
It's just that CTHD desperately tries to tell a story that is not there. What I have seen was just a heap of scraps glued together in some vain attempt to make up for a storyline. The beginning is somewhat promising and then after 15 minutes or so everything starts falling apart. New characters appear out of nowhere, things happen for no apparent reason, emerging subplots turn out absolutely meaningless. Now, I know this was supposed to be a story about love, but I expected some logic nevertheless. Silly me. The desert part caught me off-guard, just as I was beginning to doze off, and kept me puzzled for the next half an hour. There is no momentum, the pace is in reverse proportion to the swiftness of the fighters. Halfway through I still didn't care a bit how this was going to end. All the excellent performances I'd read so much about turned out to be just mannequins walking or flying around, staring blankly at other mannequins' faces and going off into overdrawn conversations on a par with an average "The Bold and the Beautiful" episode. I can't remember a single laugh from any of them, not a tear shed, not a single expression of unrestrained emotion. I'm not sure which of those dummy figures I was supposed to dislike or sympathize with. I wouldn't be able to anyway.
The only good thing about it is that I didn't see it in a theater. Wasting 2 hours is enough, having paid for it would have made it even worse.