2008, China
Adventure, Drama, Romance, War
READ THE REVIEW AT The Desert Sun.
Extended version:
After 17 years of high stakes Hollywood action flicks such as Mission: Impossible II and Face/Off, director John Woo returns to his native China and his Hard Boiled star, Tony Leung, to create an epic Asian adventure that can hardly be contained in its two-and-a-half hours (in fact, slimmed down from the Asian-distributed two-parter). Woo's latest film, Red Cliff, keeps the blood and humor flowing, winking at the audience beneath an engaging saga of war and peace.
Red Cliff tells the typical western, where the man in black has taken over as sheriff and fancies the Lone Ranger's gal to be his bride. So he shoots up the town, inadvertently though expectantly throwing former adversaries together to fight at dawn for land and love.
Only in Woo's legendary story based on Guanzhong Luo's thirteenth century novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it is 208 A.D. during the Han Dynasty. Self-appointed Prime Minister Cao Cao (Fengyi Zhang, Farewell My Concubine) has bullied the emperor into allowing him to stage a war against new Southlands allies Sun Quan and Liu Bei, represented respectively by their keen military advisors Zhou Yu (Tony Leung, Lust, Caution) and Kong Ming (Takeshi Kaneshiro, House of Flying Daggers). What Cao Cao plays up as a need to extinguish rebel activities is actually an elaborate and excessive war to bring him closer to Zhou Yu's beautiful wife, Xiao Qiao (fashion model Chiling Lin in her debut role).
The terrible irony of fighting over this particular girl in question is that, despite being married to great military hero, she fancies herself a pacifist. The Art of War-quoting pacifist, but a peacenik nonetheless. Meanwhile, the world is on fire, just in time for Woo to step in with his trademark martial arts sequences, led by action director Corey Yuen (X-Men). Blood shoots from wounds in slow-motion as a spear is pulled through one soldier and stabbed into another. Battles are long and elaborate, with clever group tactics and swift one-against-all combat. There are no small parts, only small stuntmen, as bodies fly from impressive explosions for a third century battle. And the film never forgets to perform a speedy close-up of an angered foe's face before the real bloodshed begins.
Woo aimed to create a cinematic Asian Troy, and he does just that. A detailed army of 800,000 is viewed from land, air and sea, thanks to a crew that includes Oscar-winning production designer Timmy Yip (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor Craig Hayes (Hollow Man). The imagery is vast yet believable as war is waged by physical manpower before expanding to biological warfare and the harnessing of nature.
With Red Cliff, Woo does not disappoint in creating a lively heroic adventure by returning to his roots while incorporating a little Hollywood gloss. Perhaps there is a message of peace buried under the bodies, but watching the body count rise proves dreadfully entertaining.