#Hidden blade movie

He, Leung creeps around hotel corridors and stares out back-lit windows, constantly smoking to ward away complicating thoughts. Another guy threatens an unarmed victim like he's a Bond villain gloating to Timothy Dalton: 'To make things easier, I think I'll have to kill you.' 'Never let emotions get in your way,' warns a third character, seemingly on behalf of their chilly, but genre-savvy creators.Īs Mr. He's the doomed lickspittle whose faith in his peers is rocked every time they reveal themselves to be as faithless and amoral as they, uh, constantly tell us they are? 'I can only keep going until the end of the road,' one guy mumbles aloud like he's the second coming of Yogi Berra. Watanabe is the kind of villain who bares his teeth and makes idles threats. Almost every action and line of pseudo-abstract dialogue blithely hints at heavy events 'Hidden Blade' rarely slows down long enough to consider potential emotional fallout. Chen ( Zhou Xun), who's inevitably threatened with sexual violence.

#Hidden blade movie

The filmmakers never stop telling you what their movie is about without ever making you want to invest in He, Ye, or Watanabe, or any of the secondary characters caught in their crisscrossing orbits, like He's love interest, Mrs. 'Hidden Blade' indicates dramatic tension through scenes that are elliptical and needlessly clipped. So maybe it's not that surprising to see Leung's star power wasted in such a dour genre exercise, whose high-toned cinematography, handsome period costumes, and nostalgia-inducing production design also only underscore how shallow and unlovable everything else tends to be. But the movie's big, state-approved climax is very much what it is: an execution that's represented as a fist-pumping triumph, complete with one major character revealing to the other the real secret of his success-he's a Communist, too. In this way, viewers must focus on the characters' wearying struggle against the cruel Japanese-whose attack on Guangzhou leaves one main character to mourn their innocent brother, who dies alongside his cute Shiba Inu, named Roosevelt.

Both the plot's narrow scope and free-associative structure are telling, since the story begins in 1938-when Japanese pilots and Chinese collaborators bombed the Chinese city of Guangzhou-and ends around 1946, months after the war's end.

Meanwhile, Tony Leung indicates, with his attentive eyes and endless cigarettes, an earthier and largely unexplored way into this sadsack arthouse drama. Watanabe's commands are still unfair, and the consequences of his actions are brutal and, yawn, destabilizing. Both He and Ye try to satisfy the increasingly testy Watanabe, but he's too much of a stock villain to be a major threat. Ye ( Wang Yibo), who chases after and retraces He's steps in order to secure more information for too many masters. He has allied with the relatively impressionable Mr. He, one of many ill-fated spies who actually serves the Chinese Communists while also seeming to collaborate with the Japanese-mostly represented by the haughty Nipponese official Watanabe (Hiroyuki Mori)-and President Wang's puppet government in Manchuria. ' In the Mood for Love' star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, smiling mischievously throughout, plays Mr.