I can't remember the last time I saw a serious action movie I really, whole-heartedly enjoyed. Sure, there have been several that I liked, but, when you come down to it, they were all derived from either the "Lethal Weapon" model or the "Bruce Lee Action" model (even Jackie Chan takes inspiration from the Bruce Lee style, although he does parody it rather than imitate it). However, I can safely say that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon manages to shake the expectation of a bad Bruce Lee clone, and is definitely the best action movie I've ever seen.

Basically, Crouching Tiger is a mix between Bruce Lee (martial arts, but with an emphasis on weapons), The Matrix (gravity defying leaps), and Mononoke Hime (love story and medieval setting). You'd think it would come off as incoherent, but somehow it manages to do everything right. It is technically live action, and doesn't belong in the anime section, but I don't have a live action review section so live with it.

I'll admit this: Living in Ithaca has given me one advantage. The director of Crouching Tiger (Ang Lee) came to Cornell several weeks before the movie hit public, and gave a select few a private screening. While I wasn't there, I know someone who was, so I managed to get some first-hand information about the making of Crouching Tiger. Basically, when Ang Lee was a kid, a local newspaper ran a serial soap opera-ish fighting story, where a couple paragraphs would be printed every day. Lee says that the serial inspired him, and that one of his lifelong dreams was to make a movie based off of it. And, of course, Crouching Tiger is that movie.

And it shows. The story centers around an ancient sword known as the "Green Destiny," which has the power to cut through other weapons with ease. The sword is stolen soon after the movie begins, and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) must recover it. The other two main players are Jade Fox, who killed Li's master to gain the secrets of his martial art, and her disciple Jen (Zhang Zi Yi), who I can't really say anything about without spoiling some of the story, but she does become one of the main centers of the story.

I don't want to spoil the story too much, but I will say that it's good. However, the big draw, of course, are the many fight scenes. Including everything from a rooftop fight to a one-on-one duel in an arena to a battle among the treetops (litterally) to Jen casually taking out an entire restaurant filled with other warriors, all while giving the most self-indulgent and cool speech of the movie ("I am the Invincible Sword Goddess!"). All the fights are done with Matrix-ish anti-grav jumps, choreographed by The Matrix's very own Woo-Ping Yuen.

Overall, this is definitely one of the best movies to grace our movie screens in a long time, and I recomend that everyone go and see it right away. Go go! Other things can wait.

SCORE: 9.0
The only thing that keeps this from being a perfect 10 is that it's only about 2 hours. More! More!