Visually stunning, but ultimately empty

Rating: 6/10 (23 September 2004)

First, the good news: Ying xiong (Hero) should win all kinds of technical awards for costumes, cinematography, set design, and possibly music (beautiful score, wonderfully performed by Itzhak Perlman). It's simply a beautiful-looking movie, and plenty entertaining if all you're interested in is a series of attractive, unrelated frames of celluloid.
Unfortunately, that leads to the bad news: there's no story here!! Or rather, in an aborted attempt to rip off Kirosawa's technique in Roshoman, there are three different versions of the same story, basically hung together as an excuse to have each of the leads fight each other at various times. The dialogue was laughable, the wire work was directly lifted from a lot of other (and better made) martial-arts movies, and the "gifted" Jet Li manages to run through the entire gamut of emotions, from A to a slightly different A.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!
And finally, my primary complaint is with the motivations of the characters here. Despite being highly-trained assassins, and very motivated to kill a megalomaniacal King bent on conquering their homeland and/or killing their families, at least two of the characters pass up an opportunity to kill him? WHY??!! Because he's changed? No- as it turns out, he conquers all of their lands, and sets himself up as the first Emperor of China (as revealed in the postscript). This film glorifies militarism and totalitarianism; as a propaganda tool for the current Communist Chinese government, it must be very popular.