Hero is a better film than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Ang Lee's sword- centred melodrama was, for most, their first taste of wushu - a Chinese film and fiction genre which loosely translates as 'heroic warrior' - and it certainly delivered on the lyrical action front. My Father Is a Hero (simplified Chinese: Hero is a 2002 Chinese wuxia film directed by Zhang Yimou. Starring Jet Li as the nameless protagonist, the film is based on the story of Jing Ke's assassination attempt on the King of Qin in 227 BC. Tony Chiu Wai Leung as Broken. The king however responds he sees trough an elaborate plot involving Nameless. Click the 'Watch on Netflix' button to find out if Hero is playing in your country. Hero review: Sooraj Pancholi, Athiya Shetty. Watch Movie Review: Why . Star Cast of Hero: Sooraj Pancholi, Athiya Shetty. But there was always, for some at least, a slight inauthenticity to it; it felt like a faithful imitation of something much greater. It was like watching a competent remake when you hadn't seen the original. Zhang Yimou, who has emerged as one of the East's most visually adventurous directors, and cinematographer Christopher Doyle have between them raised Joel Silver's famous action bar too high for Hollywood's current reach. Indeed, it's an irony that a helmer of the Fifth Generation (a school of directors defined by their exposure both to Western movies and new filmmaking technologies) should now have pushed the craft of action way beyond anything that commercially- driven Western cinema has so far delivered. The fights form a consummately sustained crescendo: a contest in a rain- drenched chess arena, daringly conducted mostly in the protagonists' minds, is followed by a frantic battle in an autumnal forest in which the blood- red duellists swoop among an orange blizzard of falling leaves, before Yimou abruptly switches the colour palette to greens and blues as the pair of assassins dance a pas de deux above the glassy waters of a placid lake. Doyle - a cinematographic genius who gratifyingly prefers to do most of his work while, as legend has it, moderately pissed - points his camera at hissing swarms of arrows which turn the sky black; a deathly game of hide- and- seek is acted out between apparently endless sheets of billowing green silk; and a scene in a library involves- Well, no description could do it justice.
You've seen a lot, but you've never seen anything like this. Despite a surprising - to Western minds at least - subtext in which the security and unifying force of totalitarianism is valued above putative democracy and individual freedom, Hero's central story is as flimsy and soggy as damp rice- paper. An attempt to bolster the simplistic machinations with a multitude of perspectives feels a little forced and even dishonest. While this conceit provides a swift excuse for another astonishing action sequence, you have to wonder exactly what right he has to do so, not actually having been there. It's about movement and colour and music. And rarely in any country's cinema will you see a film so wondrously charged with all three. You'll be hard pressed to find anything as visually dazzling as this in cinematic history.
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