Pretty fluff

Rating: 5/10 (30 August 2004)

Of the many films of Akira Kurosawa that yet loom large in the creative consciousness of filmmakers around the globe, I remain the least impressed with Rashomon. While it is a fine enough film, I find it to be overshadowed by most of Kurosawa's other efforts. Apparently I'm in the minority on that view, because Rashomon is tirelessly copied again and again, usually without much skill or success.
Hero is one of the more recent attempts to take the old formula (Rashomon is around five decades old now) and do something creative with it. Jet Li stars as the Nameless One, a super bad-ass who defeats three assassins who wish to kill the King of Qin (Daoming Chen), who wishes to conquer the warring states of pre-China and unite the country in one great realm. All of the film is actually told in flashback, revealed in a conversation between these two characters. We see the same sequence of events three times, with precious little variation between them plotwise.
And I suspect the makers of Hero knew this. The film is extraordinarily short on substance and very long on style  not always a bad thing, but unless you're extremely deft, you're going to get caught, and to my mind, they do here. Taking a cue from the Back to the Future films, the Hero folk realized if you're going to watch the same thing over and over again, it had better be really pretty. And that's where the strength of Hero lies. The visuals are sumptuous and stunning; we are treated to mono-color designs (that must have been computer enhanced) that absorb the eye in vibrant pools of color. Save for the Nameless One's fight against the first assassin, Long Sky (Donnie Yen), every other flashback is told in a single but different hue; one time all the clothes and sets are blue; another green, and still another (and the most striking), red; and so on. This provides some breathtaking visuals, and is really quite very well done. But unfortunately, it still remains expertly executed window-dressing on a paper-thin plot. If half the attention had been paid to the story as was lavished on the visuals (and casting: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, and Zhang Ziyi show up as well), then Hero could have been much more than just extremely pretty eye-candy. But it's not.