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Warriors of Heaven and Earth
Unless you’re a hard core martial arts fan, don’t be tempted by this rental if your neighborhood video store is all out of Hero. It’s a seventeenth century snooze.
Thursday, December 9, 2004
By Larry Carroll
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Columbia Tristar Home Video
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A deadly emissary
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Confused Tiger, Napping Dragon might be a good alternative title for Warriors of Heaven and Earth (a.k.a. Tian di ying xiong) , a would-be epic of kinship, kismet and Kung-Fu that made its way to video this week. Although die-hard genre fans may want to seek out director Ping He’s attempt to imbue the spaghetti western with a fortune-cookie sensibility, everyone else would be better off just seeing Hero again as the film wastes inspired moments of extreme beauty and creativity with a poorly paced and often incomprehensible script.
Sometime during the seventh-century, fugitive army officer Li Zai (Jiang Wen) is confronted in the Gobi desert by a Japanese emissary named Lai Xi (Nakai Kiichi), who has orders to execute him for treason. Instead, the two come to respect each other and form a tenuous alliance to protect a caravan transporting a Buddhist monk and a valuable treasure. Meanwhile, a cold-blooded warlord (is there any other kind?) named Master An (Xueqi Wang) becomes determined to turn the whole motley crew into vulture food and take the treasure for himself.
What follows is a cinematographer’s reverie of wide-open sand dunes, orange skies and rugged warriors on horseback, moving from one dialogue-heavy scene to the next while being periodically interrupted by fairly well-choreographed fight scenes. Some particularly innovative moments of battle – a sword fight between two people on either side of a wall, a castle with a moat of flame – will shock those in the audience. Unfortunately, so will the scarcity of such action in a film that is targeted to this audience.
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Columbia Tristar Home Video
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Half-hearted love interest
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Ping He seems determined to be seen as a John Ford or an Akira Kurosawa, not just another chop-sockey director with a fondness for slow motion, so he sets in motion a series of secondary storylines that are too underdeveloped to realize the complicated moral decisions they’re meant to portray. Wen Zhu (Vicki Zhao, Shaolin Soccer), a half-hearted love interest who is supposed to be exposing the inner goodness of Lai Xi, is expected to do so with what seems like ten lines of dialogue; the monk (Yun Zhou), a pacifistic master of meditation, suddenly and inexplicably exacts the most violent act in the whole film; Li Zai and Lai Xi keep promising each other that they will eventually battle each other to the death, but for reasons best kept secret it never happens.
Presiding over it all is Master An, an absurdly indestructible baddie who barely breaks a sweat while working toward his quests for world domination, mastery of Zamfir’s pan flute, flawless mimicry of the mannerisms of Prince circa Purple Rain, and a gold medal in the Lionel Ritchie look-alike contest. Like so much else in the movie, the villain is trying too hard to be taken seriously.
Indeed, the deadliest presence in Warriors of Heaven and Earth is not Master An, but the film’s poor pacing. Ping He falls into the trap of believing that a movie must be of tremendous length to be an epic, and there are times when the tribulations of the warriors on screen are nothing compared to your own personal struggle with your eyelids. Normally, this would mean that the film should have had a more hardnosed editor, but this isn’t true with Warriors. The half-hearted storylines and laughably abrupt ending reveal that, if anything, the film should be longer but with more energy put into different places.
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Columbia Tristar Home Video
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A ridiculous villain
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The actors are all professional (more adequate than memorable) and many seem to have been selected for athletic prowess rather than their ability to deliver a line. The one notable exception is Wang Dehun, playing a burned-out battle horse named Old Diehard who starts out as a fairly standard Western cliché that would have been played by Richard Harris a decade ago, but ends up as a distinctive, charming character.
Diehard has to persuade the others to let him tag along and does so when, too tired to stand, he still blocks an attacker skillfully. As they wander the desert and dehydration becomes an issue, Old Diehard’s unreliable memory gives him visions of a river that he believes used to run right through their location. Dehun’s portrayal of a character who trusts his body and mind less with each passing day, but whose heart remains just as huge, is something special.
For every plus, however, Warriors seems to have two minuses. One of the most annoying is He’s tendency to fill his battle scenes with an abundance of close-ups and edits. As a result, the action is often drowned in a sea of confusion, leaving the audience to wonder who just killed who, and where the main characters are in relation to one another on the battlefield. Similarly, the music and special effects of the film are also too heavy-handed, sucking the viewer out of whatever story momentum He can occasionally attain.
Ultimately, Warriors comes to an abrupt conclusion that isn’t nearly as heavenly as it wants to be. In the last line of the film, a character says to another, ‘I am going with you,’ and then the two walk off in different directions. Like so much else in the film, it’s a confused attempt at a dramatic moment that you can either forgive, condemn or laugh at.
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