Ladies and gentlemen, we have a reason to go back to the movies. Forget the diarrhoea the studios are dripping onto our Indian screens in their desperate attempt to win stupid, meaningless awards. There is a movie out there that loves us.
Chow Yun Fat is Li Mu Bai, a great Wudan Warrior eager to retire. He gives his legendary sword, the Green Destiny (sounds like a failed Plymouth, doesn’t it?), to his friend. Soon, the great sword is stolen and Michele Yeoh, Fat’s longtime unrequited love helps him retrieve it. Fat and Yeoh suspect the Jade Fox (Pe Pe Chang), Fat’s longtime enemy who killed his master and stole the Wudan handbook.
But Pe Pe Cheng has help from the young, impudent and impossibly beautiful Ziyi Zhang. She’s the daughter of an ambitious governor who has committed her to another man’s son in order to help his career. Zhang would rather be a female warrior like Yeoh, and she is slicker with a sword than I am with females and believe me, I’m good. It is Zhang who stole the sword and read the illiterate Pe Pe Cheng the Wudan Warrior manual.
Zhang also pines for her desert-robber boyfriend, Chen Chang, a rogue softie who robs the rich as they travel through the desert, and likes nice hot baths in his cozy cave. In a fabulous flashback, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tells how, after a robbery, the snotty Zhang chases him halfway across Mongolia to retrieve her stolen comb. The chase and rolling, kicking, slugging fight becomes a game and then love. I truly love a woman who will take on a man in a fight on equal terms. Of course, she is promised to someone else and to a life as a boring aristocrat, not a sword-wielding warrior.
Zhang is so great (that’s all I can gather from my list of words). It’s the type of kick-ass female that Hollywood will never get right. She’s tough, flawed, selfish and moves faster than a sales clerk at malls disappears when you ask for help. She should be unlikable but because of her true love for Chen Chang and her unlimited talent for fighting, she is worth saving.
Back in the present, Zhang is forced to marry her father’s friend’s son. Chen Chang disrupts the wedding, and Zhang escapes. Fat and Yeoh follow Zhang and the Green Destiny across China. Her love for Chen Chang reminds them of their own love that could not be consummated because of politics. Pe Pe Cheng is jealous of Zhang because she would not teach her everything in the Wudan manual. Zhang is the better fighter now, and the jealousy makes Pe Pe try to kill her
I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the hype is true. They’re awesome. The fighters leap from rooftop to rooftop, battle on tree tops and climb walls with ease. Much of the flying looks fake; they are clearly being lifted by wires. But, the actual fighting is, well, forget it, I can’t think of great enough words without sounding like a quote monk. They’re amazing. And somehow, I forgot about the fakeness of the flying.
Some people say it’s like ballet, but that’s bullshit. If ballet were half this entertaining, and more people in the Nutcracker Suite got the crap beat out of them, I’d join anybody for a show. This is way better. Fast, furious, beautiful and better than I have seen in any other movie. Yes, better even than Master of the Flying Guillotine. I found myself with clenched teeth during most of the fights. These chicks should be Charlie’s Angels, and mediocre director McG should watch this movie to learn how to creatively stage fights, not just rip off The Matrix again.
Ziyi Zhang is so goddamn pretty she lights up the screen with her little smile and her rudeness. She’s not pretty like a female across the counter at my favourite restaurant I’d want to bend over and talk to. She’s pretty in a way that I would be happy to just sit and stare at her for hours. Perfect skin, perfect eyes and plenty of fire in her eyes . I always will root for beautiful, snotty girls who are as good as they think they are.
Yeoh is great, too. There’s the right amount of sadness in her, and she gracefully plays the aging warrior who knows her opportunity for love is slipping away. She still looks sort of hot, too. Fat doesn’t have much to do but fight, and he’s good at that, but it’s more fun when the women are beating each other up.
The movie has problems. There are many long talky scenes where a lot of history and philosophy is explained. They disrupt the flow of fights and explain way too much. The first fifteen minutes were slow and dull. I thought I had accidentally stumbled into golden harvest, the standard-bearer for excruciatingly dull Chinese movies. And the movie ends in a drenching bath of melodrama. The last fifteen minutes were as long as the first fifteen. But, overall the movie is like a good 40 litres of chocolate sauce. I was left with a warm, fuzzy aftertaste and buzz.
Bingo for ’Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. I’m giving it that not because it’s perfect, but because it’s great and it shows the weak-ass Hollywood martial-arts rip-offs as the frauds they are.