Too Short...Way Too Short

Rating: 9/10 (17 September 2004)

This was a GREAT movie! It was a lot like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but with almost non-stop action. Jet Li played his usual quiet unassuming, but confident hero. He is a good martial arts star, but he is NOT what made this movie great...
The direction and cinematography were what made the movie great. Spectacular scenes like a rain of tens of thousands of arrows and a duel in the autumn leaves. There was the constant blowing of silk in the breeze. It was a stunning motion picture...
Ziyi Zhang, from Crouching Tiger and Rush Hour 2, was her usual snarly self.
The characters of Broken Sword and Snow were much more complex and enjoyable. In the various retellings of the same story, relationships are invented, changed and destroyed. People die in flashback, only they didn't REALLY die, only maybe they did...who knows.
An interesting feature to this movie is that you never see blood on any of the characters (my son noticed this). It might pool at their feet or drip off of a sword, but the wardrobe remains untouched. I feel that this symbolizes the god-like purity of the characters.
The only problem that I have with the movie, outside of wanting more, was they death of key characters at the end (I won't tell you which one(s)). As I told my with after Crouching Tiger, "If every character isn't dead by the end of a Chinese movie, the audience demands their money back"...
See it!