"Heroic" and beautiful

Rating: 8/10 (30 March 2005)

"Hero," completed in 2002 but through some special promoting complements of Quentin Tarantino, was finally released to the American public in the summer of 2004. I've seen it twice; this is the most delicate and beautiful of what I call the "art house" martial arts movies (i.e., "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "House of Flying Daggers"), and I'm simply amazed at the film's production, cinematography, fight scenes, and of course, Jet Li. Li is the most talented martial arts superstar the movies has seen since Bruce Lee. Li plays Nameless, a wandering magistrate who, as the film opens, entices the imperialist King of Qin (Daoming Chen) with a story of how he single-handedly defeated three assassins who had each vowed to kill the king. Much can be said about the film's fight scenes, which are beautiful and are amazingly choreographed, but the biggest problem, I think, lies within the story. I had to sit through the film two times before I felt I could get a grasp on everything, but maybe it's just me. The movie sometimes tends to meander through some of its slower parts and that could take points away from an otherwise excellent film. But as I stated before, the fight scenes are magnificent, the standouts of which come to include a fight between Nameless and Sky (Donnie Yen) that takes place inside a chess house, and the two float and practice their swordsplay as a blind man plays music during periods of when nothing goes on between the two men, and they just listen to the sounds as the man plucks away at the strings. And there is another scene where Nameless battles Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) over the serene mirror of a mountain lake, and the two men are careful to not break the water's surface. An excellent and delicate film.
"Hero" - 8/10