
Let's be clear from the start: I love Zhang Yimou films. Absolutely adore them. House of Flying Daggers is without doubt one of my favourite films of all time. I even managed to blag my way into one of the first UK preview screenings of it. So it was with great anticipation that I watched Curse of the Golden Flower. I missed it at the cinema - mainly because it can be a real pain in the arse trying to find anywhere playing World Cinema outside of Dublin - so I finally got round to watching it on DVD this weekend.
And... it's not very good.
Don't get me wrong, it looks incredible, as can always be expected. It's even more extravagant than his previous films; the palace is literally stunning. It's an utter explosion of colour, the costumes are beyond extravagant, and, somewhere between House... and Curse..., he discovered boobs. This film is cleavagetastic. Seriously, Gong Li could use her cleavage as a shelf. The openng sequence is just boobs.
Anyway, enough about the boobs, and onto what's wrong. For a start, this is barely a martial arts film. It's true that Yimou's films have always been more than martial arts; hell, House... is a love story with kicking. But this is just a period drama; the final battle withstanding, there's very little action that sticks in the mind.
More criminally for me is the storyline - while it's as twisting and turning as its epic predecessors, it's also predictable and quite dull. All the characters are very two-dimensional, and are all unlikeable, despicable, back-stabbing shits. There isn't a drop of sympathy or empathy for any of them at all, meaning that quite frankly, I couldn't care less about who came out on top of the family power-struggle. They're all just bland. It's not like the characters from Hero or House; just think of the fantastic characters in those films: Maggie Cheung as Flying Snow, Donnie Yen as Sky, Jet Li as nameless, Zhang Ziyi as Xiao Mei, Andy Lau as Leo, Takeshi Kaneshiro as Jin... they were all fantastic creations, larger-than-life. Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li are both pretty good, but there's just not a lot below the surface. They're both plotting, scheming, evil shites.
It's all surface and no depth. Without the backbone, Yimou's visual opulence just accentuates how shallow the film is. There's very little to recommend about the film apart from just how pretty it is - and what's the point of that when you could just watch something with beauty and depth?
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