Let's drop the marketing shorthand and grab the popcorn. Yet the latest work seems less social commentary or comedy of manners than his other work, and it differs from martial arts movies in its balance of drama, romance and action. But that is not to say it is anything less than sensational. The last several scenes wash over an audience and you lap them up gratefully.
Conflicts come to their logical end, characters come to deserved and undeserved ends.
One of the most lyrical scenes in Lee's movies occurs near the end, where a master who seeks a pupil finds a battle in an elegant setting that it is dream-like, impracticable in this life, and foreshadowed in the fields of green that ripple under the gorgeous characters of the main title of the film. There is unrequited love and longing fulfilled throughout this epic of ancient China. Taking up the popular genre of the Hong Kong martial arts film, Lee and his collaborators invest it with the notion that there are secret, higher levels of Taoist thought that can make you a better person, but first, a better fighter. Chow Yun Fat is Li Mu Bai, the greatest martial arts master of his time. She has her secrets, and the unfolding of her talents is the center of the movie.