Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Herald rating: * * * * *

Cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Zi Yi, Chang Chen

Director: Ang Lee

Rating: M (low-level violence)

Running time: 120 mins

Opens: Boxing Day

Review: Russell Baillie

In the fighting bits of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a lot of folks get their gobs smacked. You will be too.

That's not just because of the martial arts action - which doesn't just defy gravity, it positively embarrasses it - it's because there is just so much going on that shouldn't, by rights, be in the same film.

That action is at once balletic and slapstick. Its bar fight scene is the best bar fight scene, ever. While the first 20 minutes might be worringly stately, much of the rest of it is a risk to your adrenalin gland, funnybone and that bit of your ticker which skips a beat when it detects something true in a screen romance.

That's especially true of the pairing of Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, playing veteran warriors whose professional ethics have stopped them from expressing their feelings for each other.

And while one of the two central love stories might be the stuff of fairytales - the princess and the honorable bandit - and fighting for attention between the brilliantly choreographed mayhem, they are both delicately drawn by director Ang Lee.

Perhaps that's not unexpected of the Taiwanese film-maker considering the way he got under the skin of his characters in Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. What is unexpected is Lee's way with a film that is just plain Big. Its wide horizon scenes suggest a John Ford western transposed to the Qing Dynasty, while it's also an exercise in applying Western production values to Hong Kong's historical martial-arts epics, though it comes with subtitled Mandarin dialogue.

Safe to say, it's got quite a plot. That involves the aforementioned princess, Zhang Zi Yi, who might be a demure royal daughter by day but after hours she's on a masked mission to steal an ancient sword named Green Destiny about to be hung up by Chow Yun-Fat. Meanwhile, Chang Chen's desert bandit kidnaps the princess and then steals her heart.

After that ... well, the story just unfolds fabulously riding its fine line between the high-flying fantastical and the ground-level emotional all the way to its truly cosmic ending. Severely brilliant.