Flying Daggers, like Hero before it, is basically a big screen version of an old Chinese fairy tale/legend about events in the feudal ages. Both films are pure eye candy, with numerous indoor and outdoor sets, beautiful and elaborate costumes, and lots of impossibly gorgeous scenes in nature. (I say "impossibly" since lots of them are computer enhanced to look even better than they actually were.)

Both films have the same weaknesses though, with style and colorful costumes being valued more highly than plot or story or character, and both films have a lot less martial arts action than you probably want. They're basically period dramas with big soap opera type plots and lavish costumes, punctuated by occasional balletic martial arts sequences, and filled with plot mechanizations and twists that you're not likely to really care too much about.

To the scores, which are explained here. I'm also including my scores for Hero, for the sake of comparison.

House of Flying Daggers Script/Story: 5 Acting/Casting: 6 Action: 5 Humor: NA Eye Candy: 10 Fun Factor: 5 Replayability: 6 Overall: 6

Hero Script/Story: 6 Acting/Casting: 6 Action: 4 Humor: N/A Eye Candy: 9 Fun Factor: 6 Replayability: 5 Overall: 6.5

As you can see, the scores are almost interchangeable, and I didn't give either film high overall marks. I do not yet have a review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon online yet, since I saw it long before I began blogging and reviewing, but I mention it since that's the Chinese martial arts epic most people are familiar with. I don't think CTHD is a perfect film; the middle plot section with the princess and the bandit in Mongolia sort of bores me in it's Romeo and Juliet-ness, but overall I think that film is brilliant, and I would rate it higher than either of these films in every category except perhaps Eye Candy.

As I said in my Hero review, the biggest difference is that CTHD has a vastly better plot, with characters who have depth and who you really care about, and a plot that you get involved in. As much as I wanted to love Hero and Flying Daggers, I couldn't since they just aren't very good movies. They're gorgeous, they're sweeping and epic and all of that, but I never cared about any of the characters, I didn't care how the movies turned out, and I was just watching the pretty colors parade across the screen with no emotional involvement.

Flying Daggers has a plot, to be sure. Lots of things happen, there are a lot of characters, there are betrayals and double crosses and climactic battles... I just never cared who was in them, who won them, or how they turned out. In fact, the movie actually has a bit too much plot, since while the central theme is an odd sort of love triangle, that triangle is obscured by subplots about spies, subterfuge, government corruption, rebellions, war and ambushes, secret missions, and much more. A better screen play might have brought all of the elements together and enhanced the love triangle and tragedy, but as it was the movie felt far too crammed with things that weren't needed, and things that kept us from having any emotional involvement in the story unfolding.

Besides the "who cares" plot issues, Flying Daggers just really needs more martial arts. Hero wasn't perfect in that way, but at least there were a number of good fight scenes, even if they weren't anything like the ones in Crouching Tiger. In Flying Daggers there are several fight scenes, and they're all of the air ballet style of these fantastic Chinese wuxia epics, but they aren't exciting or visceral. They're over-choreographed, in a way, with every maneuver a flip or a leap or a spin, when a simple slash or jab would be more appropriate. Basically, they look like martial arts exhibitions rather than actual fights to the death. The flying dagger scenes, several of which you see in the trailers, are pretty to watch, but with the obviously CG daggers sailing around and maneuvering as much as a fighter kite, they're sort of pointless. They are visually-arresting, with the camera usually following the dagger as it spins, then curves, then flies straight to the target with deadly force, and if you can ignore the problems with gravity and inertia and other aspects of physics it's cool to watch. But since every dagger throw is aimed at a disposable soldier or other grunt who is clearly just there to die, it's not as if you ever doubt that the dagger is going to find a soft spot as it zooms around, sneetch-like.

One area that Flying Daggers improved upon Hero was in the Eye Candy department. Both films are simply overflowing with pretty colors, costumes, outdoor scenery, and so on, but in the case of Flying Daggers, I thought less was more. Hero was trying so desperately to make every single scene gorgeous that it was very obvious, and by the last third of the movie, when all the characters had appeared in different-colored costumes in every set, I was betting with myself about what color they'd wear next, and if they would contrast or blend into the scenery of the next location. So Hero was very pretty, but in an oddly ham-handed way. Flying Daggers wasn't actually as pretty, but since it hewed a bit more closely to realism I gave it a higher score. The characters didn't go through a complete wardrobe change every other scene, and most of the outfits seemed basically practical and realistic; fleeing prison escapees weren't wearing all white with red sashes to make them beautiful against the shadowy forest they were running through, for example. As they would have been in Hero.

Flying Daggers did overdo several aspects though. I have never seen a film, Westerns included, that had more slow motion shots of horses galloping past the camera in front of a gorgeous forest background. I suppose that was better than the endless shots of arrow porn that Hero was filled with, where the entire sky was turned black by a flight of obviously CG arrows at least five times, but the endless "and now we'll watch a horse run past in slow motion" shots in Flying Daggers still got a bit tedious.

The obvious comparison for me is the Lord of the Rings films, where every bit of the scenery was gorgeous and colorful and beautiful, but that wasn't the point of the movie. It was just part of the background, and it made the film more enjoyable to watch without seeming like an art show or a travel video.  The LotR movies are far better in every other way as well, but I'm not going to go into that.

Lastly, something I think Yimou Zhang would really benefit from is a sense of humor. He's great at cinematography and costumes and action scenes (though he needs to work in more of them), but all of the characters are always so grim and serious and driven that they seem robotic. We don't need (or want) some wacky Jar Jar-esque side kick, but it would greatly benefit his movies to have a character who didn't always appear to be on his way to get a root canal. There could even be humor in the action; someone actually throws a dagger or fires an arrow that doesn't go where they want, or a sword breaks and someone has to run away, or a guard gets scared and starts blubbering after seeing 10 of his company mowed down. It's not hard to work in lighter moments into an action movie, and if done well they make the action more enjoyable in the same way a rollercoaster blends ups and downs and corners, rather than just going down and down and down all the time, at ever higher speeds.

Overall, I enjoyed Flying Daggers a bit more than the scores and my comments might indicate. It was probably a better film than Hero on the whole, it's just that after seeing Hero so recently (thanks to Miramax dragging their feet so badly on the US release, which should have taken place in 2002 or 2003.) I couldn't help but compare the films, and I was disappointed that the director hadn't progressed any from Hero, which I thought had tremendous potential that was largely wasted by the uninvolving and overlong plot. Therefore, when Flying Daggers was more of the same in almost every way, my reaction was harsher than it would have been if I'd never seen Hero at all.

Hey, I never said movie reviews were fair.

Checking Rotten Tomatoes, I see that the film has 88% positive reviews, with 123 positive and only 16 negative. My review would be negative, but only just, and while I can see the point of the positive ones (most of which laud it for the beauty), the negative ones are almost like my own brain waves, transcribed to the computer screen. A few quotes:

"An outsized and endlessly pretentious romantic action-melodrama, in which the director has clearly lost any sense of moderation or self-discipline."
-- Rob Blackwelder, SPLICEDWIRE

"Its 2 hour length seems like 3 and the feeling of being cheated by an unending set of directorial switches becomes as inescapable as those boomeranging daggers."
-- Jules Brenner (FC), VARIAGATE.COM

"[T]he sense of wonder Yimou strains for would be seriously hampered by his lack of humor even if he were one of the great stylists of movie history."
-- Alan Dale, BLOGCRITICS.ORG

"The next logical step for Yimou is to give up on plot altogether and simply film sword fights and death scenes set to haunting Chinese music."
-- Jurgen Fauth, ABOUT.COM

"Lyrically beautiful, with rich Oscar-winning sound - and a snoozer of a story."
-- Karina Montgomery, CINERINA

In other words, if you can focus on the scenery and the pretty people and the occasional action and ignore the dumb and uninvolving plot, you'll probably love it. If you can't, you won't.

Incidentally, and this bit of trivia is completely irrelevant to the review, the film's title in China is "Shi Mian Mai Fu," which translates literally to "Ambush from Ten Sides," according to the IMDB page. I've heard of some creative translations, but to get "House of Flying Daggers" from "Ambush From Ten Sides" is really stretching it. It's obviously a far better name, but it changes the movie title from being about a sudden attack to being about the house or clan or tribe in the movie who were called Flying Daggers, due to their attack style of magically throwing blades with impossible accuracy and directional changes over great distances. True, the House of Flying Daggers people were capable of ambushing from many sides at once with their boomerang style daggers, but if you heard the two titles what are the odds that you would guess they referred to the same movie?

Makes you wonder what creative liberties are taken with other movie titles as they are translated between languages, and how often they are improved as much as this one was?

May 23, 2004

For the past year I'd been thinking that Hero would be the next Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; a Chinese epic set in the sword and non-sorcery era with a romance and gorgeous fight scenes and all of that. It may still be, and it's finally got a pretty good trailer online, but with Miramax delaying the release of Hero in the US for over two years so far, we may have to move on. Move on to House of Flying Daggers! It's taking the Cannes Festival by storm.

Sounds pretty cool, eh? I hadn't heard anything about it before this article, so I hunted around and found a link to the trailer (scroll to the bottom of the page). But when I watched the trailer... eh. Nothing special; just a lot of scenes of the male and female chars kissing, with half-second shots of sword fights. The trailer is way, way, way too tightly-edited; as if they got paid by the number of cuts. It doesn't help that it's in unsubtitled Chinese, but the biggest problem is that no scenes are shown for more than a fraction of a second. The movie may be brilliant, but the trailer sucks.