So just who the hell is Su Chao-pin who
directed this film. He only has three films to his credit - something titled
Better Than Sex in 2002, then Silk in 2006 and this film in 2010 and nothing
since. Silk is a very good Taiwanese horror film - well worth checking out
- but none of that explains how he directed one of the best Wuxia films of
the past decade. This is simply an amazingly good film that kept me enthralled
through much of it - in particular the final hour is all consuming. Ah -
ok I see that John Woo is credited as co-director. That could explain a lot.
Though most famous for his Heroic Bloodshed films, Woo has edged into period
action films with Last Hurrah for Chivalry before he hit it big with A Better
Tomorrow and then later directed Red Cliff I and II. So how much of this
is Su Chao-pin and how much is Woo is hard to say - and let's also give credit
to one of the best action choreographers around for decades - Stephen Tung-wai.
In fact, Tung was one of the action choreographers on A Better Tomorrow as
well as Silk.
What makes this Wuxia really standout is
not the action scenes as good as they are, but the story itself that is complex,
full of defined characters and some wonderful twists and turns that give
the film a real sense of suspense. Now admittedly there is a dash of The
Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis and a touch of My Wife is a Gangster
2 - but if you are going to borrow I always say take from the best. The film
takes some of that but adds on layers upon layers of character development,
graceful style, great period design and a seriousness that gathers force
as the film progresses. It has a pretty decent cast as well - Michelle Yeoh
(sadly dubbed into Mandarin here) who was initially reluctant to accept it
in concern that her action days were in the past (well that was not the case
as she made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny in 2016), Shawn
Yue as one of the assassins, Kelly Lin, Barbie Hsu as another assassin who
eats up her role and Jung Woo-sung, a well known Korean actor (The Good,
The Bad and the Weird). And every actor here is given space, a scene or two
to bring out their characters and make them much more than nameless killers.
A monk from India went to China hundreds
of years ago and died and was cut into two and buried. A myth arose that
anyone who had both sections of his body would be given great kung-fu powers.
Always looking for a shortcut, martial artists and others have been looking
for both parts ever since and now the Dark Stone Assassins think they know
where one part is. They find it but in doing so have to kill a magistrate
and his son. Female assassin Drizzle gets the body part and runs away with
it and disappears. Eventually she decides she has had enough of that life
and goes to a skilled surgeon and has him change her looks entirely. As she
tells him I want to look normal, average so that no one will notice me -
and so she changes from Kelly Lin to Michelle Yeoh. Not so sure I agree with
the average part of that! Yeoh takes on the name Zeng Jing and settles down,
rents a house and sells fabrics. A few years pass. The local Fed Ex of the
time Jiang who delivers packages at full speed clearly has a thing for her
and she sees a good honest man and they get married and live happily ever
after.
Ok - not exactly. This little cute romance
slows the film down for a while but that gives it that much more punch later
on. The Dark Stone Assassins are still looking for her and one day in a bank
(My Wife is a Gangster 2) she has to give away her martial arts skills to
save her husband from being killed in a robbery and they come looking for
her. The husband goes, don't tell me how you did that. I don't want to know.
In one of my favorite scenes, she knows they are coming and so she knocks
out her husband, opens the doors, gets her hidden sword and calmly sits down
waiting for them. To a large degree the halved body is a McGuffin, a Maltese
Falcon - everyone wants it for a different reason and are willing to betray
others for it, to kill for it - it really doesn't matter but it is a great
vehicle to push the action, the tragedy, the karma, the sacrifice that soon
is to come. I can't believe this one slipped by me ten years ago but I am
glad that I finally caught up with it.
