The Assassins
 
                            
Director: Zhao Lin-shan
Year: 2012
Rating: 7.5
I figure if I watch enough of these Chinese historical epics, I will get a pretty good handle on Chinese history. With all of them I read about the characters afterwards but in truth it is hard to keep it all straight. Their history goes so far back and has so many empires, Emperors, battles, regime changes, traitors, heroes and villains that trying to put it together isn't easy. It is worse than trying to remember all the Kings and Queens of England and their deeds and misdeeds. I always felt sorry for British students who had to learn that stuff but it must be even worse for Chinese. What I think someone needs to do is teach history with movies. Put together a curriculum of films in historical order for people to watch.



Not sure where this one would fit. It takes place around 200 A.D. and the main character is a famous legendary general who fought in loads of battles - winning most, losing some but over time uniting parts of China into the Eastern Han Dynasty.  We come into the story near the end of his life as he tries to secure what he has achieved while enemies are out to kill him. His name was Cao Cao and you can look him up. Or watch more movies as he has shown up in a number of them - Three Kingdoms, Lost Bladesman, Dynasty Warriors, Red Cliff and many TV shows.



This is one of those dazzling Chinese epics that have become fairly common since The Hero. Beautifully shot with huge casts costumed to the gills with ornate detailed interiors and edifices, movement wonderfully choreographed, beautiful women everywhere you look and of course palace intrigue. Lots of that. The films can feel weighed down with their history, serious, important, rarely light or amusing. It is Chinese history and there is no fooling around with that in the Mainland. Hong Kong films of this nature never had the budgets to create these incredible sets but they were light on their feet and could be great fun. They could poke fun at Chinese history, not these guys. Every moment feels deadly, has menace, has meaning. This does from the very start.



Young children are being kidnapped and trained to become killers. Hundreds of them. Not all will graduate. Two of them fall in love. Ling Ju (Liu Yifei) and Mu Shun (Tamaki Hirosi). But this isn't a place for love to flourish. They have all been trained with one purpose. To kill one man when the time comes. To ensure that no love will last, they take Mu Shun and turn him into a eunuch with one swish of the blade. His love lasts but they both know it has nowhere to go. He joins the Eunuch Royal Guard while she is placed in the home of Cao Cao to be his mistress and wait for orders. The first time he sees her she is dressed in stunning red set against a backdrop of gray at the top of a set of outdoor stairs. It brought back memories of Maggie Cheung in Hero. She is exquisite.



Cao Cao is played by Chow Yun Fat. Played brilliantly by him as he turns what could easily have been a one-dimensional character into something much more - authoritative, cruel, heroic of course but he shows other sides to him that make him a nearly tragic sympathetic figure by the end. The Emperor (Alec Su Youpeng) is weak, nonsensical, prone to bursts of song and unable to control his Empire or his regime. That is left to Cao Cao to do who has fought battle after battle to unite it and defeat the Emperor's enemies.  He has his own palace and army. There is a prophesy that when four stars align there will be a regime change. Cao Cao refuses to believe it. The King does and who else could it be but Cao Cao. With that event being forecast soon, the intrigue begins, the betrayals, the executions, the children now grown up ready to fulfill their mission.



Most of the film is intrigue and drama with a high degree of tension surrounding it but there are two attacks against Cao Cao that are splendid and imaginative in their hope of getting to Cao Cao and his troops repelling them. Directed by Zhao Lin-shan in his only film and coming in at a sensible 100 minutes. No padding here really. But it slowly unravels the plot revealing who Cao Cao and others really are. I expect many wanted a lot more action. There are all these trained killers and soldiers but it never gives in to that. A few more assassination attempts would have been fun but it remains stately and serious, the love affair between the Ling and Mu Shun feels peripheral to the story and one might wonder what the point was. But give me gorgeous sets like this and palace intrigue and I go home a happy man.