Rarely will I give a film such a high rating

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2003)

I am generally fairly strict about how I rate films. Rarely would I give a film a 9.
It starts out slowly, the first half of the movie. It actually does start with a bang (a battle scene) but after that, it slows down for the first hour or so. But it's like a good book - you have to set up the story for what's going to happen. Because after that first hour, it really picks up the pace. Scene after scene, the suspence of what is going to happen to all the characters that you've begun to understand and root for.

So many different themes run through this movie. I've come to the conclusie that it's just as much of a think-movie as a smash-and-bash movie. You get everything from revenge (as the Chinese say, when one starts on revenge, go ahead and dig two graves) to loyalty, power, fear (in more ways than one), even love - yet it manages to avoid the clichés.
Just remember, in this film: is the bad guy really the bad guy and is the good guy really the good guy? Is anybody actually ever right?