Very disappointing

Rating: Null/10 (28 January 2003)

I saw Hero for the sake of it, and it was very disappointing to say the least. I never thought Crouching Tiger was particularly good, but after watching this film, I'm starting to like it a lot more.
Hero undoubtedly has a much grander scale, whereas Crouching Tiger told a more personal tale. Unfortunately, director Zhang Yimou, who has made such excellent drama films, failed miserably in this attempt to reach out to the 'global market' the way Crouching Tiger did. The cinematography was good- a lot of the scenery was extremely beautiful, the score was adequate, Chen Daoming was great as the Emperor, and the first fight scene between Jet Li and Donnie Yen (the only two with real martial arts backgrounds) was finely staged- but these were only few positives that I could find with the film.
I think the main problem may have been the film's intentions- to steal the things that made Crouching Tiger successful and try to place it on a much wider canvas with lots of special effects. In the end the film was uninspiring- the script was poorly written, with thin characters and some very very bad dialogue; the special effects, while effective in some parts, was largely over the top (especially the scene with the leaves); with the exception of the first, the fight scenes were very standard and not particularly exciting; and the artistic attempts (with all the colours) felt somewhat pretentious.
No doubt a lot of people will still like this film, but it certainly didn't move me one bit. 2.5 stars out of 5.