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Hero

Wednesday, January 19 2005

So I saw Hero last night. While I understand (I think) the point of the movie, I can't believe anyone ever dared to compare it to Crouching Tigeer, Hidden Dragon. First off, the first 15 minutes of Hero is plagued by classic slapstic kung fu (some of the side characters act a little too crazy for an art fu movie).

Second, Jet Li just isn't very good. He doesn't have a good on-screen presence, nor is he overly believable in any role I've ever seen him in (The One? Cradle 2 the Grave?).

Third, they really focused too much on those god damned water drops. In, the fight with the first assassin they made a huge deal out of it raining and did some "neat" special effects with Nameless splashing his way through them Neo-style, however, every 13 seconds they cut to water drops falling off of something. After that fight scene, every time there was water, enter the every-13-second cut scene of water drops falling off of someone's chin, sword, roof, etc.

I have no criticism of the unique color schemes per scene; those were neat, however I still can't figure why they did it (other than "dude, wouldn't it be like so rad if like, in this scene everyone was like totally blue, and in the next scene everyone was totally yellow!" - in a japanese accent of course).

The action was good, the story was all right, the moral was mediocre (maybe it's less mediocre to the culture in which the movie was originally created?), and the execution and art fu qualities kind of disappointed me.

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