Good, but highly overrated.

Rating: Null/10 (21 March 2001)

Just returned from seeing an excellently-dubbed "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and I'm very disappointed. The movie is good, but not that good. When I read reviews like "One of the greatest movies ever made!" I'm expecting to be...well...um...I wasn't expecting this beautifully-filmed but fairly pedestrian flick. Ok - the music is great, the cinematography looks good, but if you want to see astounding cinematography in a Chinese movie, I have two words for you: "Yellow Earth" (Kaige Chen, 1984). If you want amazing Martial Arts action combined with excellent acting, look no further than Jackie Chan's 1994 "Drunken Master II" (Yes - THAT Jackie Chan!!). From reading the comments on this site as well as several external reviews, it would appear that the persons who were most impressed with this movie never saw a Martial Arts or other Chinese film before. Now about the flying...
In a word - SILLY!!!!
It was overdone, completely unnecessary, and detracted from what was an otherwise okay movie. For those unfamiliar with the genre, when this is done, it is usually just at the edge of believability - like "did I really just see that?" or "can they really jump that high?" not this Peter Pan/Superman nonsense. Strangely enough, I was most impressed with the dubbing. I was expecting it to be subtitled as I had heard that Ang Lee was totally opposed to dubbing. However it was done, great care was taken in the choice of voices, and at times the dubbing was almost seamless - you forgot that they were really speaking Mandarin.
Bottom line - worth seeing, but don't believe the hype!