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Kaige's "The Promise" arrives in a year
crowded with Asian big-budget martial arts epics,
counting among the competition Jackie Chan's
"The
Myth", Tsui Hark's "Seven
Swords", and Myung-se Lee's "The
Duelist", with 2006 promising even more
titles from the genre. All four films have opened
with mixed results, their pedigree as an Asian
film trying mightily to replicate the
Hollywood
formula earning them equal amounts curiosity and
scorn. To be sure, the qualities of the films have
varied greatly, with critics and audiences alike
failing to come to a meeting of the minds whether
they're good, bad, or somewhere in-between. Of the
four, Chan's "The Myth" might be the
only film to have garnered anything approaching
agreement on the part of fans and critics, if only
because it's the most innocuous of the bunch.
The setting of "The
Promise" is a little different than its
fellow Asian epics, in that Kaige has decided to
create his own world instead of going back to
either Ancient China or Ancient Korea. In the
world of "The Promise", a man can outrun
a stampeding head of bulls, a man can swing a pair
of golden balls and defeat an army of 20,000 men,
and a Goddess can float about, dispensing tarot
readings for no apparent reason. Yes, ladies and
gentlemen, "The Promise" is basically
"Legend", "Krull", or any of
those fantasy/sci-fi/action-adventure movies that
were booming in
Hollywood
during the '80s.
The star of our epic is
Korean actor Jang Dong-Kun ("Taegukgi"),
playing a slave name
Kunlun
who has not known freedom, or choice, since he was
taken from his home as a child. After his master
is killed during a battle being fought by General
Guangming, a man decked out in magnificent crimson
armor (aka the Master of the Crimson Armor),
Kunlun
ends up Guangming's new slave. Soon, slave and
master crosses paths with the lovely Princess
Qingcheng (Cecelia Cheung), who is so lovely she
can get an army to drop their weapons for a
glimpse of her in the buff. We also meet the
effeminate Duke Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse), who wants
Qingcheng for reasons unknown, but if you pay
attention you'll probably guess his reasons
before it's "shockingly" revealed at the
end.
If it sounds as if "The
Promise" meanders, that's probably because it
does. The film doesn't get under way until almost
30 minutes in, and even thereafter it continues to
idle, seemingly unhurried by the conventions of
story progression. Clocking in at just under 2
hours (making Kaige's movie easily the shortest of
the Asian epics), "The Promise" is also
bothered by unsophisticated editing. To count how
many times the film suddenly jumps to a new angle
within the same scene is to spend too much time
counting. Which is to say, for a big-budget film
made by an internationally famous director, the
editing problems in "The Promise" are
unforgivable. Did they cut this thing on an Avid
or a Moviola?
The main cast is
appropriately international ("Get it seen by
everyone!" is the motto for big-budget Asian
epics nowadays), with Jang Dong-kun hailing from
Korea, Hiroyuki Sanada ("The
Last Samurai") representing Japan (a
major import target for the film), and of course
Hong Kong's own, Cecilia Cheung and Nicholas Tse,
who is still letting his hair do all the acting
for him as the film's playboy/villain. I've always
found Cecilia Cheung ("One
Nite in Mongkok") to be appealing, but
her character in "The Promise" is not
exactly the model of attractiveness. Written to be
the most beautiful woman in the world, Cheung's
Qingcheng has the type of personality that makes
you think twice about asking her out for lunch.
Although the four main
characters get most of the screentime, the film's
emotional highlights involve Wuhuan's right-hand
assassin, Snow Wolf (Ye Liu), who as coincidence
would have it comes from the same place as
Kunlun
. The two men's interactions make up the movie's
most sincere and affecting moments, with Snow
Wolf's situation beside Wuhuan even less tenable
than
Kunlun
's. Ye Liu ("Purple
Butterfly") delivers a perfectly
understated portrayal of a doomed man permanently
locked in a state of emotional anguish, and it's a
crime he's been left out of the film's massive PR
push. It's also a shame that
Kunlun
and Snow Wolf's shared story gets what amounts to
a condensed presentation, because this truly has
the makings of an epic.
The best way to approach Chen
Kaige's "The Promise" is to just go with
the flow. Having wisely set itself beyond any
recognizable time period or setting, the movie
gets to explore all the wonders of today's special
effects, something it does frequently, and with
mixed results. And for a film advertised as a
martial arts movie, "The Promise" has
surprisingly few fight scenes. The bulk of these
are squeezed into the film's first 20 minutes
during Guangming's battle against an army of
generic "barbarians", and again in the
final 20 minutes, which contains about 2 fight
scenes total, both much too short, with the final,
climactic battle incredibly underwhelming.
"The Promise" is
not nearly as bad as you've heard. True, it's no
great film, and the decision to spend so much
screentime on the lightweight romantic
entanglements between the four leads effectively
destroys any chance the film has of being
memorable. As a result, "The Promise" is
camp, colorful, and has millions of dollars to buy
special effects -- some of which looks cheesy as
hell, while others, like the background visuals,
are stunning. In short, it's everything you want
in your Hollywood Summer blockbuster -- loud,
bright, expensive, and vacuous -- except, it's,
er, from Mainland China.
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