The Assassins

THE ASSASSINS should be a good film, but it isn't. It's an expensive, expansive Chinese historical drama, featuring the great Chow Yun-Fat in a role which must be a given for him: he's playing the ruthless general Cao Cao, a guy who engaged in and won plenty of battles in the famous Three Kingdoms period. And yet the film chooses a moment at the end of his life to tell a sluggish and rather dull story of a love triangle and hidden romance.

The film looks lavish, for sure, and Yun-Fat gives a solid turn as always. The costumes and sets bring to mind the sumptuous nature of Zhang Yimou's CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, but there the similarities end. The problem is that THE ASSASSINS isn't really about assassins at all, because these characters achieve very little in the storyline. The main character, played by Liu Yi Fei, is completely dull and goes around moping and crying all the while as she falls in love with Yun-Fat's character. Come the end you realise she's made no impact to the storyline and could easily have been excised with no ill effect.

In a bid to counter all this sentimentality, the film-makers throw in a handful of decent action sequences in which the heroic general fends off various attacks by his rivals, including the Emperor. These moments mean that the film isn't bad as a whole, but it's a far cry from what it could have been with a script re-write. There are also some ludicrous scenes which drag it down, such as the one where a horse happily jumps off a cliff.