Huh?

Rating: 6/10 (14 January 2001)

...I don't know - I'm not much of a martial arts film connoisseur, so maybe I just can't appreciate the film's merits. For anyone who cares, however, I'll tell you what I saw. I saw a rushed storyline, littered with overly elaborate flashbacks that spread the plot far too thinly, leaving me wondering who it was I was supposed to be caring about. Li Mu Bai? Why should I care about him? Okay, he's a great warrior, he's retiring, and he supposedly has this long history with Yu Shu Lien. None of this is bringing tears to my eyes, but hey...maybe the movie's really about Jen Yu, the renegade daughter of the Governer. Hmm...she's a brat, she's hard to like, and the only history of her I'm given is a flashback that takes up a quarter of the movie just so I can see how she met Lo? All of the passion in this movie is extraordinarily superficial. I never once got the impression that Li Mu Bai really *loved* Yu Shu Lien, and I'm sorry...Jen's love for Lo wasn't demonstrated well enough for me to understand her suicide. Like I said, perhaps I can't appreciate why this film is supposed to be good. It seems like a lot of "I love you, I hate you. Let's fight to the death." The fight scenes were exhilarating at times, but the use of wires was way, WAY over the top. Where I was expecting superhuman leaping ability, I received out-and-out *flight*. It was much easier to accept in The Matrix where it was (a) the future, and (b) NOT REAL. Nothing in this movie suggested to me that we were dealing with a fantasy land, so I was left wondering why Yun-Fat Chow was doing his best Mary Martin impression. To put it bluntly, the script was shallow and predictable, and the fight scenes were exciting and well choreographed one minute, then completely overblown and down-right *silly* the next. The acting was decent and so was the casting, but neither of the latter two are enough to make this a good film - CERTAINLY not the 27th best of all time on IMDb's list. I think we're going to see that there because this film hasn't been exposed to a mass audience. People who love martial arts flicks are going to cream themselves over this one, just as people who like teen dramedies confess time and time again that Empire Records is the greatest film ever made. It's these disgusting opinionists that are going to make me hate this film, but it won't take much time.