Jet Li's best, but not Zhang Yimou's best

Rating: 8/10 (19 April 2004)

Having gotten sick of waiting for this film to be released in the U.S., I purchased it on import DVD.
The producers of Hero obviously want to cash in on the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Hero has a number of traits that are similar to CTHD: a cello and drums score, with similar musical themes; awesomely beautiful locations; a fictional story set within historical China; interesting martial arts fight scenes, assisted with wire-fu.
That said, Hero stands on its own as a film, and the common elements with CTHD are mostly superficial.
Hero is action star Jet Li's best film, so far.
Director Zhang Yimou has made many truly excellent films, including "Raise the Red Lantern", "The Story of Qiu Ju", "Keep Cool", "Shanghai Triad", "To Live", and so on. When ranking Zhang's films, I have to put Hero at the bottom of an impressive list (although I have not seen "Codename Cougar").
Judging on visual style, it is Zhang's best. It is simply beautiful. Many sequences are monochromatic, or monochromatic with one accent color. Zhang even chooses landscapes to match his color schemes - an impressive feat (although some locations, such as the Li River near Yangshuo, have been enhanced - either digitally or through split-grade filters - to achieve the monochrome effect). Zhang was even granted permission to film at the UNESCO World Heritage site, Jiuzaigou (Nine Village Valley), with its unusual blue lakes. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle also deserves credit for the stunning visuals.
Hero has a clever and interesting story line, where we revisit the same events and characters multiple times, each time with a new piece of information which completely changes our interpretation of what happened, and the motivation and goals of each character.
However, while CTHD has a strong emotional core, Hero does not. The film has a distant, intellectual feel. Zhang's strength, in his previous films, is in telling intimate stories of people, even if the setting has epic proportions. In Hero, he attempts to tell a grander story, with large, heroic characters, and fails. The characters remain distant and cool, like pieces in a chess game.
The performance of Maggie Cheung, as Flying Snow, is the strongest. Cheung is one of the most expressive and emotionally true actresses working today. She manages to breathe a lot of life into a thinly drawn character.
Flying Snow's partner/lover, Broken Sword, is well played by the always enjoyable Leung Chiu-Wai. As with Cheung, he manages to put some life into his character, but has little opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, the role does not permit Leung to use his smooth charm and intellect.
Zhang Ziyi gets the worst of the deal. Her character, Moon, is a stale stereotype which gives her no room at all to breathe, strangling her performance. This is sad when compared to her wonderful performance in Zhang Yimou's earlier film, The Road Home.
Jet Li is not known for his acting prowess. His character - the central role in Hero - is a loner/assassin type, and plays well to his strengths and weaknesses as an actor. He turns in a career-best performance, adding some roguish charm to an otherwise mostly physical performance (at which Li always excels).
Hero is worth watching as a visual statement, and for its intriguing, twisting storyline. It is unfortunate that equal time was not devoted to developing strong characters, to give an emotional core to the film. As with some other recent large budget, epic, and ambitious films from China (The Emperor and the Assassin, Musa), too much time was spent on grandeur (of story, scenery, sets, and costumes) and not enough on the basics of character and emotional interest. Ang Lee has shown the path, but other directors are having difficulty following it.