Ang Lee's first disappointment...

Rating: 7/10 (8 December 2000)

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is one of those movies that come to our shores with much pre-release hype. After all, this has been playing the festival circuit to much praise as well as trophy acquisition. The hype surrounding this flick has been unavoidable and would serve to show that this film should indeed be the masterpiece that it's been cranked up to be.
Unfortunately, "Crouching" ends up being a passable film that is quite disappointing on a lot of levels. While the basic storyline seems to invoke some fun melodrama, diehard martial arts fans will be saddened to see that the fighting scenes are poorly rendered and made unrealistic beyond recognition. Character development is rather limited and the audience can pretty much determine things from their basic understandings of movies. This is really not the film that it should've been.
Basically the story breaks like this. Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) has to return a famous sword called the "Green Destiny" to his master. He has his friend and secret crush, Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) take care of this for him. There's also a young woman, Jen (Zhang Ziyi) who is engaged in an arranged marriage and ends up having an affair with an outlaw, Lo (Chang Chen). Since the sword obviously gets stolen, all these characters end up entwined in some way.
The thing that has caught many critics' attentions with this film are the action sequences. I'm saddened to report that for martial arts fans, this will be a major sore spot. The filmmakers elected to overuse "wires" to lift the actors around and have also blended in some digital effects from the "Romeo Must Die" school of filmmaking. I love wire stuff as much as the next fella (check out Jet Li's classic, "Once Upon A Time In China" for great usage of this), but this is ridiculous. All suspension of disbelief is gone once you see these actors fly over the rooftops for long periods of time with minimal effort. This is not just leaping (which would've made more sense). Actual lift-off. Plus, much of the editing distracts from the hand-to-hand combat scenes and this makes it even more obvious to an audience that it never really is that intricate and exciting. With the minimal impact that these characters have when fighting, it looks more like an art exhibition than a true martial arts film. This is the film's biggest debit.
Next up is something that not many people will notice: the widely varying accents of the actors speaking Mandarin. Yeoh and Chang seem to have the worst ones and this automatically disqualifies us from believing that the film is set in the early 19th century. True, this shouldn't be a big deal, but it really becomes distracting as 2/3 of all dialogue seems to have been relooped in post-production, sometimes mid-sentence! I admire the actors' attempts to get their Mandarin in check (as it certainly isn't easy), esp. Chow Yun-Fat's proper diction (even though just about all his lines are redubbed). Again, this doesn't affect the majority of viewers. For those who will notice, this REALLY diverts from their appreciation of the film.
So, what really works in "Crouching"? Peter Pau's sumptuous cinematography captures the atmosphere of the setting quite well and it's also fun to see Beijing rendered digitally a la "Phantom Menace." The ripe melodrama between the couples is also well-established. Their situations are rendered in an overwrought fashion that leads to some unintentional laughter. All that level, the film does succeed and we do see the actors giving what they can to their performances (even with the dialect problem).
It's a shame here that the director is Ang Lee, esp. since the guy is a master at films in different genres and settings ("Wedding Banquet," "Sense & Sensibility," "Ice Storm"). He is truly a brilliant filmmaker, but I think we've found his weakness. He understands the importance of cultural differences and generation gaps (as well as showing scenes of people eating, something greatly lacking in this film!). With "Crouching," most of those elements aren't necessary b/c of its sole location. He has, on the other hand, correctly rendered the feeling of the pulp novels on which this is based in a grand fashion. Maybe "Crouching" would've been better if there were no martial arts at all. However, the tone of the film keeps shifting. What style is he trying to accomplish here? One second it's an arty Mainland Chinese epic (in the Zhang Yimou vein of "Raise The Red Lantern"), the next second an HK B-movie actioner, then a modern Taiwanese soap opera? These elements are too diverse to try and combine successfully in one narrative.
So "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" may become the arthouse hit that it's destined to be due to curiosity and hype. My hope is that those piqued viewers interested in seeing better martial arts epics will come away from this experience in a renting mood. Go out and try locating the classic 70's Taiwanese martial arts flicks by the underappreciated auteur, King Hu. Or even any old Jet Li/Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao flick will do the trick. Those martial arts films indeed have the sheer visceral thrills that "Crouching" seems to have forgotten completely to accomplish.