Such a disappointment

Rating: 7/10 (9 February 2001)

I had been looking forward to this movie for quite some time, mainly because of all the rave reviews it got in all the press out there. But to my astonishment I was very disappointed with this movie.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (CTHD) is pretending to be this very deep and philosophical fairytale about Jedi Knight-like warriors who transcend earthly bonds and jump around like they can fly. The best one of this pack, a role by Chow Yun Fat, is sick and tired of his warrior existence and decides to quit and give his sword, Sword of the Green Something, to some official in Peking and call it quits. But there we have his arch enemy, Jade Hyena, who killed his master and who has trained an apprentice. This apprentice, Jen, played to excellence by Ziyi Zhang, has her eye set on the sword to become the next greatest Wudan (the order) big-shot. Along the way there are some love-interests played out, but these just take way to long.
All in all a nice premise for a fantasy fairy-tale set in China. Unfortunately director Ang Lee chose to keep the pace a little too slow. In many scenes I was bored out of my skull and I even fell asleep regularly during the whole desert sequence, I'm sorry. The acting was good enough from some people to not annoy me. It was nice to see Chow Yun Fat return to his native language, as was Michelle Yeoh, who by the way made no particular impression on me. Fat's death in the end made no impact at all on me, as was the totally incomprehensible ending, what was up with that?
The real merit for this movie goes out to the production designer. Timmy Yip did a great job of creating wonderful settings and decors. The costume design was great as well. Props also. There was nothing wrong with these elements. The fight scenes was very well choreographed, but they could have been a little bit less long. They seemed sometimes to go on and on without really going anywhere. The fact that the Wodan warriors had the ability to fly didn't make me like the movie more, on the contrary, it distracted me from the actual fighting going on. In The Matrix this type of choreography for fight scenes was perfectly in place, it was right on target given the surroundings. But in this movie it was just too much over the top. One more thing, shouldn't swords be just a little more rigid as opposed to what the swords looked like in this movie. They looked like they could bend and crease very easily.
I must be invoking just everybody's wrath by now, and before people start trying to kill me for beating down on this supposed gem, I'm gonna quit this review. I award this a 7 just for the production design.
7/10