MUBI

Hero, the title that Ying Xiong is popularly known under, is a horribly beautiful yet completely ridiculous film. Fans of martial arts and action films will heavily enjoy this film, but if you are not interested in seeing a fight every 5 minutes, tune away.

After seeing Huo Zhe (To Live) and this film, I am completely convinced of Zhang Yimou’s colour-matching and cinematography skills. But unlike Huo Zhe, Ying Xiong seems to have nothing much to say and grows increasingly laughable at many points.

The fight scenes are obviously the expressionistic wire-fu type. That is not to discriminate against them; they are meant to be expressionistic after all. But Zhang virtually abuses his cinematographic prowess here, feeding us sumptious angles along with slow-motion editing and CGI, glorifying the sword and well, creating an action film no different from something like Die Hard.

(And perhaps, since the whole story is not meant to be realistic, we can move away from criticising all that business with the fire.)

Narrative-wise, the film really does not say anything at all. Fighting everywhere and then suddenly, peace and brotherhood for everyone under the sky? This is a film where characters cannot help but break out into stylistic, aesthecised fights every five minutes. By stylising these fights, Zhang glorifies the characters and thus their actions, which hence promotes the message of “fighting is good”, going in direct contrast with the film’s purported main message of peace. (This leads back to the Truffaut argument that there cannot be a true war film because portraying war aesthecises it and Godard’s response of Les Carabiniers.)

On a structural level, the film is unsuccessful too. While it can claim to have a Rashomon-like plot, it ultimately declares one version the truth, eroding away the power of perspective and leaving the audience clueless why they bothered to see the two other versions. And the setting of a mind game between a nameless (cough cough Kurosawa cough cough) man and and a king is interesting but really, it definitely cannot match up to the strength of some other great films that follow such form such as Oh! Soo-jung (Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), L’annee derniere a Marienbad, due to a lack of structural focus.

I really respect Zhang for his cinematographic skills, but Hero is just a mindless action film that the prude and miser that I am cannot enjoy.