If you suspend all disbelief you'll like it, maybe even love it, despite some confusion in the film's structure

Rating: 7/10 (28 August 2004)

Hero, translated here in the states as Ying xiong, is the kind of film that must've seemed either one of the great post-modern epics for their country (called "Our Land" the film tells us), or a flamboyant, ultra-dramatized version of the true events. At the least, Hero is helmed by a talented painter of the canvas, Zhang Yimou (responsible for the classic Raise the Red Lantern, a film about repression in Chinese society), who in-between and sometimes during the highly stylized (in the new Crouching Tiger movement of getting the characters flying high in the air as they fight), gives splendorous colors and landscapes, faces, settings, and moods. Along with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, at the least Hero aspires to a technical mastery, and it does work most of the time. By keeping the story in a tale of legend amid what was based in truth, the characters can believably be suited in the palettes Yimou puts them in.
What gets the film down, for me at least, is that it's not entirely comprehensible on a first viewing. It may help it to some that it's dense and achieving a level of wonder in the non-linear structure, sometimes I didn't know who was dead and who wasn't, and perhaps in the Rashomon sense it was effective. But to lose track of the story when the technical side is trying to be moving, by default, creates style over substance. This isn't helped by the practically emotionless Jet Li as the "nameless" one, and with a constant use by the director of slow-motion in the fight scenes. The supporting cast gets put to some good use, which includes such Chinese film heavy-weights like Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen, and Zhang Ziyi (the actor who played Broken Sword, Tony Leung, may have been the best out of them from my perspective). And by the end, the story thrusts them into the reign of the tragedy, and it almost becomes like another character, one that isn't completely honed as it should've or could've been.
When I walked out of the theater I knew that despite not being all in tune with the story (as it moved around I knew where it was going and not at the same time- a few scenes did make me start to lose interest until the next fight scene came) Hero asks to be seen more than once (maybe both times of cable, no?). On the level of the pure imagination, the film aspires to something it reaches, and it is in and of itself an epic. I just don't think it is a great one. The string sections by Itzhak Perlman are a nice touch, by the way.