Rating:

Stars: Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Chang Chen, Zhang Ziyi

Director: Ang Lee

Fight Choreography: Yuen Woo Ping

2000, Hong Kong

Supreme swordsmaster Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) decides to retire from his swordsman post and sends his precious sword "The Green Destiny" to Beijing with kung fu expert Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). Well there the sword gets stolen and Yu meets a manchurian girl, Jen (Zhang Ziyi) who is about to be married by force. Then they get the sword but it gets stolen again and they fight several nights for the sword and Li has to help get it.

 

Very exaggerated wire-flying fights that are just to much. It has so much wires in it that you could think they don't have gravity in China. It is kind of irritating when they jump and land slowly, it really makes the fights look slow and sometimes it looks like they have strong wind pushing them. The scenes where they're running over the rooftops looks exaggerated with amazingly obvious wires.

There's only one fight scene which I really liked and it's the one between Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, where Yeoh has to pick up new weapons all the time as Zhang's sword is superior. You can really see the Shaolin techniques here and it looks great, it's like different people choreographed that fight scene. If just all fights here were as good as this it would've been great. The fact that they claimed this to be the greatest kung fu film ever is unacceptable, it was probably some people who probably had seen little or no kung fu films at all. It also won two Golden Globe awards for best foreign film and best director.

What this has is lots of different beautiful settings like forests, deserts and old Chinese buildings. It also has some comedy thrown in.

The story isn't amazing but it works. I don't think you need a great plot to make a great movie, just watch Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" as an example.

 

It suprises me that Yuen Woo Ping did the fight choreography cause he has made some of the best fights on film ever. He made some other exaggerated wire movies like "Tai Chi Master" but that still looked great and didn't have any slow non-gravity jumping. The camera is also in-zoomed to much many times in the fights making it hard to see what they're doing. This is what they use to do in American movies, it would be really bad if Hong Kong movies start doing this too cause you loose a lot of technique this way.

Chow Yun Fat doesn't know how to fight. He's supposed to look superior and just stands there waving his sword with a couple of special effects thrown in to make him look good. I just don't know why they gave him the role that required most skills.

Michelle Yeoh is the one that looks best here I think and is the fastest one too.

Anyway, this is not a bad movie and it has some cool stuff in it...if they just had used the wires a little lesser this could've been really good.

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