Never quite attaining the knee-trembling brilliance of its soon to be seen sequel, House Of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou’s awe-inspiring swash-buckler, Hero is still a movie that simply begs, nay, pins you down on the ground and insists to be seen.
The most lavish movie to ever come from the PRC, this exhilarating aesthetic Molotov makes Crouching Tiger seem like a pet discarded after Christmas (still a pretty kitty but yesterday’s beast), but my goodness, what’s taken so long to release it out over here, two years after the fact? Evidently, Miramax’s Harvey Scissorhands has been tricking about with this jewel, keeping an eye on those gold statuette things they hand out in March. Happily, our noble liege, Mr. Tarantino intervened and escorted Hero to a screen near you untouched by studio hand. Well, they do owe him a couple.
Told mainly in flashback in a manner that clearly kow-tows to a certain Kurasawa flick, Hero’s nameless bandit warrior (Jet Li) is brought to the court of the third century king of Qin (the historical figure who would eventually bludgeon all of China into submission and become supreme Emperor) to relate tales of smiting the great one’s enemies, a crew of renegades essayed by Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi (the current official national muse having ousted the great Gong Li).
A riot of contradictory accounts emerge to tell of bloody battles and political assassins, torrid and tender love, romantic yearning and jealousy, a Touch of Zen and, er, calligraphy. The arrows rain down from every cloud, soldiers mercilessly seek and destroy would-be revolutionaries and colours coordinate in a kitsch manner to rival a Barbie apartment. The easily offended and hungover might well be advised to avert their eyes during the turquoise scene.
Not that Hero isn’t sumptuously, beguilingly gorgeous. Incomparable cinematographer Chris Doyle utilises a much crisper, epic aesthetic than his trademark woozy visuals with Wong Kar-Wai, and the super stylised ass-kicking (check out the dreamily relentless battle on a lake – eat your heart out Alexander Nevsky) will keep even the subtitle phobic enthralled.
Yet, like many contemporary former Soviet Bloc movies, there’s a disquieting yearning for the certainties of tyranny underlying the entire film. A glorification of all things brutal and rigid, one suspects that this last hurrah for the Chairman would surely bring that lupine smile to the lips of Mr. Rumsfeld. Weird, when one considers how Zhang Yimou and his fifth generation contemporaries laboured during the Cultural Revolution, huh?
Still, Hero’s sword-swishing, heart-breaking, awe-inspiring, mother-fucking frenzy of action and romantic sacrifice is far too glorious to argue with. Now let’s thank the good lord Quentin that it finally got here.