Horribly overrated movie with lame martial arts

Rating: 4/10 (29 May 2012)

I characterize "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" as a martial arts movie loved by people who normally don't like martial arts movies. It's mind boggling how much mileage this movie got out of its crappy, clichéd plot and annoying floaty fight scenes. The movie critics who gushed over this movie wouldn't know a great martial arts scene if they were karate chopped to the face with it. Before I saw this movie, I heard about how it had not only how it had a great epic plot, but also had excellent fight scenes. This movie has neither.
Let's talk about all of the floating. There is no gravity in this movie. The fight scenes have as much in common as footage of man walking on the moon as they do with the fight scenes in truly great martial arts movies. Ang Lee went crazy with wire tricks. Half of this movie is spent with people floating around on wires. Somebody takes a gentle jump off of the ground and floats across the room. It's ridiculous. When I saw this movie in the theater, there were numerous audible laughs from the audience at all of the unintentionally funny floating.
To make matters worse, the fight scenes are mostly a waste of time. There is no drama or plot advancement to them. For any action scene to work, there has to be a point to it. The good guy kills the bad guy and we rejoice, or the bad guy kills the good guy and we cry. Every great action scene in the history cinema has had some influence on the plot. Whoever made the dozens of cheap, cheesy Kung Fu movies that I watched on late night TV as a kid understood this. Ang Lee apparently doesn't. In many scenes, two people float around an arena fighting for five minutes, and nothing happens. You know that neither of them will get hurt, so from the beginning, it's a complete waste of time. This, unfortunately, is an epidemic in action movies nowadays. Action scenes seem like more of a tool to show off CGI or cinematography than to advance the plot in an exciting way.
This movie's plot is laughable. It easily ranks among the worst of any martial arts movie that I have ever seen. It's just a tired old cliché about an old master wanting to guide a young arrogant whippersnapper, with some "I want revenge on you because you killed my master" thrown in for good measure. The characters don't behave realistically and by the time that you are halfway, you won't even care what happens to them. When I first saw this movie, I almost felt like a practical joke had been played on me. I walked out of the theater saying "wow, is that it?" If this movie had been made in the 1970s with cheesy dubbing instead of subtitles, nobody would be giving it the praise that it has received. This is why I have labeled this movie as "a martial arts movie loved by people who normally don't like martial arts movies." People who see this movie don't realize that they are getting an old cheesy film on artistic steroids.
Do you want to see some great martial arts? Go to Wal-Mart and see if you can find some really cheap DVDs of old Chinese films from the 70s and 80s. Or, check out some Jackie Chan or Jet Li movies on Netflix. For a modern combination of great action and drama, I highly recommend Jet Li's Fearless. One of half a dozen fight scenes in that movie produce more adrenaline than all of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and its simple plot works really well too. If you normally wouldn't be caught dead watching a movie like that, then maybe you'll get something out of this one.