I hate to give such a glamorous and expensive John Woo movie a bad review, but this overlong epic based on an ancient Chinese tale, showing battle after battle after battle, has no substance at all. The void of interesting characters and the abundance of idiotic lines (a warrior asking her pregnant wife: "Are both of you OK?"; twice), made me doze off in the midst of some of the most intense battle scenes. If you enjoy interesting ancient war strategies, that's all you get here.
Mo says:
Do you remember the Japanese made for kids version of the whole story that aired on Iranian TV? The dubbed it "Afsaneye seh baraadar". It was centered on Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei as three blood brothers.
ReplyDeleteYES!!! I noticed that! I just didn't mention it in my review, because I wasn't sure how many of my (thousands of) readers would relate to it.
ReplyDeleteAnd now I know why the ending of that show was kinda confusing: the whole war was over a woman! (which probably got edited out in the Iranian version.)