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Hero review
:. Director: Yimou Zhang
:. Starring: Jet Li, Tony Leung
:. Running Time: 1:36
:. Year: 2004
:. Country: China
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In Hero, Yimou Zhang's Chinese blockbuster, invincible and noble warriors defy the laws of weightlessness, squaring off on the glossy surface of a lake, fending off thousands of arrows, always moving with grace and precision like sharp pieces of a belligerent choreography.
The film is centered around a lone swordsman (Jet Li) whose self-appointed mission is to eliminate three assassins (Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung & Donnie Yen) who have vowed to kill the emperor. Hero is mostly narrated in flashback as Li's character recounts each of his encounters with the killers.
I've never liked Jet Li, as his acting is dry and lacks the necessary charisma to transcend the martial art genre and bring it beyond a simple succession of elaborate fights. Fortunately, in Hero, he is more of a discreet narrative thread, a foil for the more interesting characters—and actors—who are the three assassins.
Well-choreographed fights and gorgeous cinematography take center stage, based on old-fashioned special effects rather than dull DGI. Zhang (Happy Times, The Road Home) aimed to create an "old school" martial arts movie soaked in visual poetry and he certainly succeeds at this level. The film offers a recurrent metaphor assimilating fighting to an art; the most obvious reference is the use of calligraphy—and paint—as a key to the mysteries of combat, but there is also the fight scene over the lake—the greatest visual achievement of this film—where each warrior soaks its sword in the water as a painter would with his brush. They craft combats as works of art and each warrior is associated with a color—and a season. They are, along with the emperor, the intrinsic part of a palette of a greater work, which is the history of China.
However, instead of focusing on this aspect which is certainly rich enough for a feature—see what Peter Greenaway did with The Pillow Book—, Hero tries to flirt with other genres, clearly aiming at being a big movie—what it actually became in Asia.
While Hero is built on a twist, which can quickly be decrypted as the characters are drawn a bit too clearly, more embarrassing is the overly melodramatic tone of the film, mostly associated with the romance between two of the assassins, whose intertwined fate is first established in flashbacks and then repeated and accentuated in the actual climax of the picture. By reaching too high, the film then loses its balance, falling from artistic grace into mainstream appeal.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: Chinese Films
Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
Reviews since 2012
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