I had heard only two things about Jet Li’s movie Hero: it has some great fight choreography and some bright colors. HBO Max has it until the end of the month, and I do try to expand my horizons as much as I can. Besides, if I only know that much, then I was bound to see what those colors add up to and see if the fights are as good as I’d heard.
Well, it is more complicated than just fighting and colors. Good.
Hey, you can’t expect all of my openings to be good.
The movie opens to tell the audience that China in those long past days was divided into smaller kingdoms when the King of Qin (Chen Daoming) decided to conquer the others. An assassin known as Nameless (Jet Li) was dispatched to remove three other assassins who are the last obstacles to the King’s ability to get a good night’s sleep. Those three are Long Sky (Donnie Yen) and the lovers Broken Sword (Tony Leung) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung). Nameless opens the movie to return to the King and tell his Majesty about his success.
That’s the premise, and yes, the different scenes are color-coded in different ways, starting with the gloomy, rainy weather for an outdoor fight with Long Sky and then on to the bright red in the desert where Nameless goes to find Broken Sword and Flying Snow. If anything, the gravity-defying battles Nameless engages in seem to go by relatively quickly, so there must be something more going on. There is, and the King thinks he knows what it is as he sits alone in a large room ten paces away from Nameless, and the King is a man who has been somewhat suspicious of pretty much everybody for quite some time.
What follows is a much more complex plan, something where Nameless had dealings with Flying Snow and Broken Sword for quite some time. The King seems to be leading to a lot of deaths, and Nameless does have motives to do what he sets out to do. But so do Broken Sword and Flying Snow, to say nothing of Sword’s servant Moon (Zhang Ziyi), all have their own goals and motives, and some of them may surprise people. And what of the King? Is he a bloodthirsty tyrant, or something else entirely?
I liked this a lot, even after it became clear the movie was basically a Chinese origin story for their country. The fight scenes were great, the design was memorable, and the plot, though twisting, was intriguing. I actually don’t have a lot to say about this one, and it was hard to get to my standard minimum of four paragraphs after the photo. This is really just a movie to experience and enjoy, and I don’t have the words to explain why. Just do it.
Grade: A
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