It's a good film but not a great one

Rating: 4/10 (19 March 2005)

Hero is a pretty good film but it's not as good as I would have thought. Jet Li plays the warrior Nameless, who has defeated three assassins sworn to assassinate the king of his region. As he tells the story of how he defeated them, it becomes obvious that every story can be told a number of different ways. The plot is pretty good and sounds interesting enough, while the execution was pretty good as well. Hero is visually stunning and it has a lot of breath taking fight scenes. The fight scenes are done well but the rest of the movie isn't really worth noting. I'm not saying its terrible but it's just not very interesting to watch and it was kind of boring. However, the film is only 94 minutes long so it didn't bother me to much. Its kind of hard to judge the acting but I did like Jet Li a long with the rest of the cast. Yimou Zhang does a decent job of directing keeping the film at a slow pace which can sometimes be annoying. I did like the way they carried out the story of how he told how he defeated everyone. The cinematography was amazing as well and if it had not been nominated for best foreign picture then I'm pretty sure it would have taken home some Oscars. Rating 7/10 a pretty amazing film at some points however not all of it is like that. Hero is still worth checking out though especially if you liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.