Red Cliff (Chi bi - 2009)

This Chinese spectacle set in 208 B.C. is about 80% battles with a huge body count. In 2½ hours, that's a lot of fightin'. That said, Red Cliff is beautiful, with magnificent locations, vistas, and costumes, and the blood spatter is slo-mo Tarantino style (director John Woo is idolized by Tarantino, and I can't say who did it first). Despite its prodigious length, what we saw was the Western release, which cut together TWO movies totaling 280 minutes, adding an opening narration in English, though all the dialogue is in Mandarin with English subtitles.

Woo has returned to movie-making in his native language after 15 years in Hollywood (Face/Off (1997), which I didn't see, and Mission Impossible II (2000), which I did, among others), which followed 14 years of directing in China. Tony Leung (I really liked In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa - 2000) which had amazing costumes, and Lust, Caution (Se, jie - 2007) which was also a return to China from Hollywood for director Ang Lee, among many of Leung's credits) showed up to star after about a half hour of plot (Yun-Fat Chow, a big box-office draw here and abroad, was set to have that role, but pulled out right before shooting) (if you think of him as Chow Yun-Fat, you'd have been right a while ago, but some Chinese movie people have reversed their names to conform with our American custom of putting family names last, e.g. actress Li Gong and director Kar Wai Wong used to be Gong Li and Wong Kar Wai) (John Woo was born Yusen Wu, and Tony Leung is also known as Tony Leung Chiu Wai). Supporting cast is mostly men, including Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu - 2004)), half Chinese, half Japanese, as the strategist, and two women: supermodel Chiling Lin as the Helen of Troy character, and Wei Zhao as the warrior princess. The battles are fought with arrows, spears, crossbows, flames, flagpoles with only a little acrobatics. Does anyone else think that Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) changed martial arts movies forever?

There are no laughs unless you giggle among yourselves (e.g. "He speared him with his own flagpole!" or "Didn't that zither sound like a ringtone?"). We hope that no horses were harmed in the making of this motion picture, because a lot of them fell down. I wanted to see it because it got a lot of Satellite Award nominations as well as one from the Critics' Choice. But it's really for John Woo fans and serious film buffs. It's not playing here anymore, so if you see it, try to find a big home theatre screen to appreciate the nominated cinematography, costumes, visual effects, etc.