The worst Mandarin accents I have ever heard

Rating: 7/10 (26 August 2001)

In general this film is decent entertainment, but one thing stops it from entering the upper tier of great films. Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh have atrocious Mandarin accents - imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 19th Century British drama and you'd be close. Chow is a Cantonese-speaker from HK, and Yeoh is from Malaysia - neither speaks Mandarin remotely like a mainlander. The fact that Ang Lee did not train them to speak better, or have them rerecord their dialogue, suggests that this film was never intended for a Chinese audience. It was always meant as a "foreign" film for US consumption. In fact, I have come across a VCD of this film in China in which Chow and Yeoh's voices were overdubbed by other Chinese actors with normal accents.