Beautiful, Fascinating.....And Yet Uninvolving

Rating: 7/10 (22 December 2006)

I gave this film two chances. I watched it subtitled and I watched the dubbed version. Both times I felt the same way: enjoyed the visuals, the leading ladies but couldn't warm up to the film nor most of its characters. In the end, I dumped the DVD. I guess you could call it a doubled-edge sword, pun intended.
THE GOOD - On one side of the "sword," you have some beautiful scenery in here. "Spectacular" might be a better description. It also features two pretty women: Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh. The latter looked the better of the two, at least in this film. The stunts, of course, are jaw-dropping. They were "news" back when this movie came out because no one - at least Western audiences - had quite seen people flying around like this doing swordplay while floating from rooftop to rooftop, etc. Nowadays, of course, since this film came out, we've seen it in subsequent movies such as "Hero," "House of Flying Daggers," "Kill Bill" and more.
THE BAD - On the other side of the sword, you have a story and characters that are just too difficult to get involved over. The characters aren't presented well enough for us to passionately root for some of them. I also don't go along with the Liberal critics who always think it's cool with women beating up all the men, as is the case much of the time here. It's stupid and unrealistic.
FINAL NOTE: I watched the dubbed version and the Mandarin version with subtitles. Both are excellent. Usually I prefer the subtitles but the dubbing was done so well that in this case, you should be fine with either choice.