ver 2,000 years in the past, the Kindgom of Qin is on the verge of conquering all of China, and one king is about to take the throne over the united lands for the first time in history. Like any great and ambitious leader, the King (Chen Daoming) has faced a number of would-be assassins during his ascendancy to the throne, and discovers that a warrior called Nameless (Li) thwarted the three most formidable of these killers: Broken Sword (Leung), Snow (Cheung) and Sky (Yen). Promising riches to anyone who can protect him as he assumes the mantle of leadership, the King invites Nameless to regale him with tales of how he single-handedly defeated his formidable adversaries.
Nameless' first opponent is Sky, a seemingly unstoppable warrior who literally can move faster than the rain falls; Nameless summarily dispatches him with equal skill and grace, and presents to the king his fallen opponent's weapon of choice—a spearhead bearing Sky's family crest. From there, Nameless moves on to a school, where Broken Sword and Snow teach and perform calligraphy; instead of battling them physically, however, he divides the pair and conquers them individually by undermining the sanctity of their emotional bonds and setting them against one another.
Despite receiving the two warriors' weapons as gifts, the King questions Nameless' stories and confronts the valiant fighter to determine the truth. What he soon discovers, however, is that a plan of remarkable complexity has been hatched both for and against the king's seemingly inevitable rule, and Nameless is the key player determining success and failure—perhaps in both cases.
Sensitive yet visceral
Director Zhang Yimou is one of China's most acclaimed filmmakers, having directed such modern classics as Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern and To Live in the past 15 years; until Hero, however, he has never shot an action movie. As a result, Hero feels more like a drama than a martial-arts epic with a few extra acting chops, and exhibits a beauty and poetry that few, if any, other entries in the genre have ever demonstrated. Like Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the film is a deeply sensitive approach to a typically visceral oeuvre, but it delivers better both dramatically and physically than any other martial-arts story I've seen, and will no doubt invigorate audiences whether or not they're familiar with the vaulting, balletic action that defines the characters' world.
Jet Li contributes the sole above-title name for the film, no doubt since his is the only one that's familiar to audiences worldwide, but his is the least significant performance in the film. As Nameless' story unfolds for the King, portrayed with sensitivity and intelligence by Daoming, each of the other warriors becomes more interesting and complex, so much so that their sacrifices and struggles eclipse those of Nameless, around whom the film deceptively centers itself. Cheung and Leung are riveting as Snow and Broken Sword, and generate a relationship that seems unable to be penetrated by doubt or insecurity, while Yen's brief appearance as Sky lends Li a formidable opponent to fight in the film's opening scenes, creating the illusion that the film might merely be yet another wire-worked tale of flying fighters that arrives on American shores bereft of intellectual or emotional depth.
That isn't to say that Jet Li performs poorly; rather, he is utterly convincing as a blank slate upon whom the film's fable can be painted. But the miraculous cinematography, by Christopher Doyle (In the Mood For Love), creates a beautiful backdrop that rivals any film in memory, shot for unforgettable shot, and engineers a delicate balance among character, plot and image that can be appreciated individually or as a complex and cohesive whole. In short, Hero is the best martial-arts movie of the year—in fact, of the decade.
