A Witless Waste of Time

Rating: 1/10 (30 December 2003)

Crouching Dragon, Whizzing Tiger is one of the most asinine movies I have ever seen. Full of itself and the overwrought, throwaway "wisdom" of the characters' cherished Wudan art, the film grates without relent.
The melodramatic fools portrayed in the film spend more time running their fatuous mouths than they do at any actual attempts at "fighting," to use the term very loosely. Particularly annoying is the silly galumphing about in the air that some of the characters do when they aren't flipping around in the dirt missing each other repeatedly with flailing, ineffective blows.
Further, their weapons are practically useless in most combats, due to their vast inability to even touch flesh with them, much less pierce it. With all this supposed training, couldn't their "warriors" be taught to use a damn firearm? A few well-directed shotgun blasts would dispatch the wallowers in short order. Ang Lee needs to take a cue from Tarantino.
Other terribly improbable inanities of the plot include a paralyzation technique performed by some jabs in the ribs, a young girl falling in love with her robber and rapist, a governess who moonlights as a murdering martial arts master and who has wanted posters of her image in many local hands but whom no one can recognize when at her day job, and a poison that supposedly makes the heart pump blood backwards. (What? It makes the heart valves turn around in the vessels? Yeah, right.)
Perhaps the most disturbing delusion is the ornate wardrobe and lavish residences in which these creatures of utter fantasy exist. Were the film to show the slightest resemblance to reality, the dire poverty of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants, the utter filth and disease and death with which they live every day, would be shown.
The one positive thing I can say about the film is that the writers for the English overdub were skilled at creating a phonemic pattern of English dialogue that matches somewhat closely the mouth movements of the actors speaking in Mandarin. The English is a creative expression of most of the concepts in the original tongue.