Admit it. It sucked.

Rating: 3/10 (2 September 2004)

Received opinion to the contrary, "Hero" is a lethargic and contrived movie, and not contrived in a clever or otherwise forgivable way. It also is full of odious and ham-handed authoritarian ideology that I'd think would be roundly condemned by American audiences (if we ourselves weren't currently engaged in an orgy of government-power worship, that is).

The twists and turns, meant to make a Rashomon-like movie engaging, are in fact flat and uninteresting. The human drama is mawkish and uninvolving.

I'll readily admit that it's quite an eyeful, but even then the combat sequences wear on the viewer after a while, and floating warriors who fight off millions of arrows with their pinky strain the credulity of adult Western moviegoers very quickly.
I have a sense that the curse of American self-consciousness is at play here -- that people are simply scared to criticize a foreign movie which takes itself very seriously for fear of being seen as unsophisticated or not "understanding" the movie. Admit it. It sucked.