A silly film, not in Crouching Tiger's league...

Rating: 7/10 (29 July 2003)

This film seems to me to have been made in part because of the success of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. While it shares many good qualities with the famous Ang Wang film, "Hero" is not successful as a coherent film.

Hero has many beautiful scenes, it seems to have been created by a painter as different scenes are dominated by one color then another. However, to my eye it seemed far too formal, to arty. For me, Ang Wang's fight scene staged in the bamboo forest works, while Hero's fight scene at a lake just left me unmoved.
While parts of the film are enjoyable to watch, the film has many flaws. Among these are (spoilers ahead):
1) Jet Li's character is uninteresting. He is called "Nameless" and he has no past, no loves, no hates. There is almost nothing to explain him or his behavior in the film. Jet Li is a an actor with almost no emotional range but I thought he did well in this film, he just had almost nothing to work with.
2) The army of the soon-to-be Emperor of China attacks a town by shooting arrows at it. This is really, really, silly. You use arrows to harass and kill enemy soldiers, you don't "shell" a town with arrows because it won't do any harm and arrows are expensive and time-consuming to make. You don't waste them by making pin-cushions of wooden buildings.
3) We see Flying Snow stab and seriously wound her (former?) lover Broken Sword three times. Once as Jet Li tells it, once as the soon-to-be Emperor imagines it, and once again as Jet Li tells it (supposedly the truth this time). This is too many times. It didn't mean much the first time, it meant less the second time and the third time the director showed the event I couldn't have cared less.
4) The most interesting character turns out to be Broken Sword who actually has a change of heart as a result of fighting the future Emperor and chooses not to kill him when he had the chance. This pivotal event takes place in the past and we only learn of it near the end of the film. Broken Sword's change of heart is really the emotional heart of the film (since Tony Leung really CAN act). By the end of the film I wished the film was about Broken Sword, not Mr. Nameless.
5) Mr. Nameless's story turns out to be a tissue of lies, his skills are largely unknown, all his fights are "fake" and by the end of the film I had no interest in his fate. What a terrible choice it was to make Mr. Nameless the main character of the film.
6) The first emperor was, by all accounts, a ruthless monster. It is no accident that the ruling power in China (nominally the Communist Party) supported this film. Just about the only tangible benefit they brought to China back in 1948 was unification. Millions dead, decades of economic failure but at least they united the country. In the film this human monster is presented as a misunderstood noble idealist. Dream on...