Directed by Yimou Zhang, who also brought us Hero, House of Flying Daggers takes all the basic elements of successful Hong Kong cinema – starcrossed lovers, impossible martial arts moves, and slowly revealed plot – and does virtually nothing with them.
Centering on blind courtesan Mei (Ziyi Zhang), the daughter of the assassinated leader of the Flying Daggers, and the efforts of undercover policeman Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to use her to find the new leader of the Flying Daggers, the movie not only proceeds at a snails pace, it seemingly includes about three basic shots, and features a translation of the Chinese that is way too informal for its genre.
Unlike Hero, House of Flying Daggers is a linear story with moderately interesting twists and turns but any plot subtleties are completely undercut by repeated, static shots of the characters’ backs as they reach some decision point in their action paths. While there is some attempt at color theming, it’s incoherent and inconsistent, and the ending is utterly predictable. It is as if the people behind this film broke Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon down into its component parts, stuck them on index cards, pulled them randomly out of a paper bag and laid them out to form the basis of a screenplay.
For this, and for the way it plays off previous movies’ hype, I’m giving this one out of five popcorns.
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