Overall Rating
 Awesome: 51.39%
Worth A Look: 25.93%
Average: 8.8%
Pretty Bad: 3.24%
Total Crap: 10.65%
13 reviews, 138 user ratings
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| Hero (2004) |
by MP Bartley
"Like watching paint dry. Beautiful paint, mind you..."
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Style over substance is one of the worst criticisms you could probably throw at any film that is truly aspiring to be something special or different. That particular criticism wouldn't hurt someone like, Michael Bay, for example, because Bay is probably quite happily aware that his films have very little substance anyway. But for a film like 'Hero' which quite plainly has big ideas and big ambitions, the lack of substance is painfully clear.Nameless (Jet Li) is a wandering warrior who arrives in the court of the King of Qin (Chen Dao Ming). Nameless believes that the King will want to hear his story and reward him, as he has thwarted the attempts of three assassins to kill the King. All is not clear however, and the King has his own view as to how events have taken place. Zhang Yimou has quite clearly seen Rashomon several times. But I'm guessing that Nick Hamm, director of 'The Hole' has too, and that didn't stop his film sucking.
Take 50 reviews of 'Hero', throw a dart at them and chances are that you've hit a sentence rhapsodising about how beautiful the whole thing is. And those 50 reviews would be right, 'Hero' is a truly beautiful experience with the cinematographer, costume designers and set designers all earning their money quite admirably here. Much has already been said of scenes such as a cloudburst of arrows, some nifty swordplay in a library and unusual use of waterdrops, and there's not much I could add to that. They are individually beautiful scenes - but Yimou doesn't know how to construct them into a coherent, exciting whole. Instead, they're almost too beautiful - too much effort actually leaves them dramatically sterile and uninvolving. For all its colour, 'Hero' is a very cold film.
The use of cinematography and set design should be the sauce or decoration for the whole film, but in 'Hero' the sauce IS the meal. Whole scenes waft by looking great but with not a single morsel of dramatic meat to them. Yimou is content to think that using colours and balletic swordplay will fill in for the holes left by an undernourished screenplay.
Partly, this is due to a sterile and perfunctory narrative. Nameless gives his side of the story through a flashback, then followed by the King giving his side. There's no real twists or anything keeping us off-balance, just a dull story retold by dull characters. Once we're made what the exact structure of the film is going to be, it never deviates, leaving events to happen in an entirely predictable way, with charmless actors failing to keep us enticed.
Li, Ming and the likes of Zhang Ziyi, filling out the other characters, also fall into the mistake of severely restraining their emotions, in the belief that this 'less is more' approach conjures up emotional depth out of nowhere. It's an approach used in Merchant Ivory films and in the hands of someone like Anthony Hopkins, it's an approach that works very well. But quite frankly, Li and everyone else here, are no Anthony Hopkins, and they don't have the skill to suggest raging emotions beneath a still surface. Instead, their 'repressed' style is dull and takes us nowhere with the characters.
So the striking use of colour and design may be initially distracting, but once you realise that that is the only trick Yimou has up his sleeve, the rot sets in and the rather glaringly obvious Communist subtext is just beaten around your head until you're counting down the minutes to the end.Like many work of arts, 'Hero' is to be admired, but never to be loved. In its attempt to drown everything in style, the dramatic potential is smothered and it comes across as rather too poised and arrogant for its own good. There's a wafer-thin story here, combined with poorly written characters and a lot of gloss. But what pretty gloss!
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=7701&reviewer=293
originally posted: 05/08/06 20:28:33
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival. For more in the 2004 San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Sydney Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Sydney Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Seattle Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Seattle Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
27-Aug-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 30-Nov-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
04-Nov-2004
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