By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
Published January 13, 2005
House of Flying Daggers (PG-13) (119 min.) - It's easy to understand why Cannes Film Festival jury president Quentin Tarantino raved about Zhang Yimou's martial arts melodrama, even as it played out of competition. The movie is everything that Tarantino expressed in the Asian portions of his Kill Bill saga; elaborate stunts and passionate justice, lovely to witness and likely to be groaned away by viewers seeking more than comic book virtues.
But House of Flying Daggers is sincere about its schlock elements and doesn't celebrate why schlock excites us. There's no winking at the audience when scenes run too long or loyalties swing. Yimou is convinced that he's creating art - which he did under similar circumstances in Hero - yet the lushly colored canvas is flat.
Consider what the two films share, and how they differ: Hero kept its drama fairly political, while the politics in House of Flying Daggers are an excuse for a love triangle. Hero had one of those, but it was deeper and became a crucial element in changing events, rather than the entire reason for the movie to exist. Hero was a Rashomon-style look at historical myth, but House of Flying Daggers is uncomfortably linear and down-to-earth, despite the wire-flying tricks. Plot twists are treated like things that need to happen rather than things that should.
The difference between a great martial arts film, like Hero, and the others, including House of Flying Daggers, is found in the elements that link the fights. This time, Yimou fills time with cliches and improbabilities, no matter how gloriously decorated they are. This is a lush, beautiful, invariably empty movie.
The first-century story focuses on the Tang dynasty, under siege by guerrillas known as the Flying Daggers. A palace cop named Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) goes undercover to investigate a brothel where someone may be a Flying Dagger. He meets Mei (Zhang Ziyi), a blind, chaste dancer who is, indeed, a revolutionary. When she's arrested, he helps her escape, hoping she'll lead him to the mysterious Flying Daggers leader.
But with a tip of his hat to Hollywood, Jin falls in love with Mei, protecting her against Tang soldiers who regularly attack to bolster Jin's ruse. Then the soldiers get serious about it, testing Jin's loyalty. Soon, his partner Leo (Andy Lau) arrives with one of several "surprises" lumped into the script's second half. It all culminates in a snowy showdown resembling the House of Blue Leaves fight that ends Kill Bill Vol. 1.
Some of the material - Jin's playboy demeanor, for example - would be pleasantly campy if Yimou would loosen up. Other storylines, such as Mei's secret past and Leo's personal interest in this investigation, might be swooningly romantic if Yimou were more interested in emotion than motion. What his film lacks in drama is exceeded by his eye for miraculous visuals, although perhaps too many use Matrix-style "bullet-time" slow-motion effects that have becomed cliched by now.
House of Flying Daggers is highly recommended for its first, gorgeous, 20 minutes, Ziyi's magnetic presence, and any fight scene except the finale. Mei's performance of the "Echo Game" dance, mimicking the order of beans randomly bounced off a circle of drums by flicking her long sleeves like bullwhips is a jaw dropper. The same goes for an assault by Tang soldiers using bamboo trees like Tarzan's inverted grapevines, then his spears. Wonderful stuff, but what lulls we endure to reach it. B
