Martial-arts bodice-ripper about a blind showgirl (the jug-eared China doll, Zhang Ziyi) who is neither blind nor a showgirl, but an agent of an underground movement (and, evidently, a 9th-century forerunner of Zatoichi) opposed to the tottering Tang Dynasty. Zhang Yimou's follow-up to his Hero dispenses essentially more of the same -- more, that is, of the sameness -- more of the monotonousness. And the addition of more and more and more ultimately equals less. What's done has been done. To death. A lot of wonderful work went into the color, the fabrics, the sound effects in the opening brothel episode, but once the initial impression has been made, once the viewer can be presumed to be in the palm of the filmmaker's hand, there is a falling-off in those departments. Always, the splendor of the settings -- the birch forest, the bamboo grove, the flower meadow, the red and yellow tapestries of autumn leaves, the climactic snowstorm -- overpowers the whimsicality of the action. (The weapons for which the rebels are named are not just "flying" daggers; they're "smart" daggers, changing direction in midflight like guided missiles.) To put it a different way, the variety of the settings overpowers the repetitiveness of the action. With Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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