Women kick butt: so what?

Rating: Null/10 (9 January 2001)

I went to see this movie with a lot of expectations, based on the great press it had received. True, it was a beautifully photographed, and perfectly-directed and -acted, as we've come to expect from Ang Lee. Unfortunately, the tired old plot (everyone has to avenge their master, father, sister, cousin, whatever) and silly supernatural effects put a huge damper on what would have otherwise been a decent adventure/love story.

It was kind of like opera, where all of a sudden two people will jump out of their conversation into a big aria; here, they literally jump off the ground and start flying around in a way that makes a complete mockery of the martial arts. The fighting in this film has been compared to the fighting in The Matrix, but the comparison isn't really fair. In The Matrix there was at least a sense of physics, even if it was an exaggerated physics, and the audience gasped with delight. In this movie, the audience I was in just laughed, repeatedly, at the silliness of it. This would have been tolerable if the actual combat was any good, but really, it's no more exciting than what we've come to expect from Jackie Chan and co., and here it ends up looking more like dancing.
The only really compelling part of the film was the romance in the desert, and even that sequence stretched out well beyond the point of interest.

This is the only Ang Lee movie where I started looking at my watch an hour before the end. I hope he'll go back to making brilliant, innovative masterpieces like The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil, and avoid trendy set-pieces like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.