Pretension thy name is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2002)

Yet another feverishly overpraised film that critics needed to invent superlatives to describe. While admittedly I am not a fan of martial art films as a rule, I have enjoyed a handful of them and thought this may fall within similar parameters. Alas the film is a debacle on nearly all fronts. After a promising start, which introduces a wise warrior (Chow Yun-Fat), a female bodyguard who pines for him (Michelle Yeoh) and a coy young woman (Zhang Ziyi) staying as a guest in the home where everyone initially intersects, the film bogs down into lumbering tedium. Much emphasis is initially placed on a sword, which during the course of the film gets stolen, returned, stolen again, but it really has little to do with the fragile plot. In fact, so thinly conceived is the storyline and dialogue that one becomes frightened that a slight breeze may shred it to pieces. Characters are introduced as if they will be important and then are seemingly forgotten in the following scenes. Headliners Yun-Fat and Yeoh (who actually manages a touching performance) seem to embody potentially interesting characters, but are shoved into the background and forced to play second fiddle to Ziyi, whose character is quickly uncovered to be a spoiled brat with a penchant for violence and destruction. Definitely not the kind of character to enlist sympathy and carry the film. Yun-Fat spends the majority of his minimal screen time trying to convert Ziyi from the Dark Side so that she can become the first woman to receive official training in the arts. There are lots of gravity-defying fight sequences that would be borderline ridiculous if the film did not treat everything with such grave solemnity. Instead, they just become boring. Ironically, the fight sequences do not even make sense within the context of the film (i.e., while the film explains the aerial acrobatics as being an effect of the mysterious "training" and is careful to explain how Ziyi and her mentor have achieved it, how then can Yeoh also manage the same aerial feats when the film tells us she has never had said training?). The desert romance sequence seems to come from another film and the set-up with Ziyi and her "kidnapper" beating each other, then resting, then beating each other, etc., all over a comb, grows wearisome quick. A friend that I saw this with waxed wistful over the drapes, tablecloths and costumes, which pretty much indicates how engrossing this will be to the average viewer. The running time seems easily double what it is and should you be awake for the jaw-dropping "symbolic" climax, you will know first-hand pretension to the nth degree.