GAMES: GameSpot | GameFAQs MUSIC: Last.fm | MP3.com MOVIES: Metacritic | Movietome TV: TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Wide Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

67 $9.99
75 24 City
66 Adoration
74 Afghan Star
48 Alien Trespass
56 American Violet
82 Anvil! The Story of Anvil
57 Away We Go
81 Beaches of Agnes, The
62 Big Man Japan
28 Big Shot-Caller, The
78 Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
55 Brothers Bloom, The
82 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
xx Call of the Wild
63 Cheri
62 Cherry Blossoms
63 Dead Snow
65 Departures
18 Downloading Nancy
58 Easy Virtue
70 End of the Line, The
77 Every Little Step
64 Examined Life
80 Food, Inc.
38 Gigantic
56 Girl from Monaco, The
67 Girlfriend Experience, The
87 Gomorrah
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Great Buck Howard, The
79 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
xx Home
82 Hunger
91 Hurt Locker, The
16 I Hate Valentine's Day
81 Il Divo
54 Is Anybody There?
71 Jerichow
58 Julia
74 Lemon Tree
36 Life is Hot in Cracktown
40 Limits of Control, The
42 Little Ashes
64 Lymelife
50 Management
57 Merry Gentleman, The
66 Moon
35 New York
62 Not Forgotten
xx Offshore
78 O'Horten
64 Outrage
40 Paris 36
54 Pontypool
71 Pressure Cooker
52 Quiet Chaos
83 Revanche
67 Rudo y Cursi
86 Seraphine
65 Sex Positive
70 Shall We Kiss?
77 Sin Nombre
59 Sleep Dealer
74 Song of Sparrows, The
54 Stoning of Soraya M., The
82 Sugar
84 Summer Hours
61 Sunshine Cleaning
28 Surveillance
42 Tennessee
63 Tetro
64 Throw Down Your Heart
80 Tokyo Sonata
63 Tokyo!
70 Tony Manero
74 Treeless Mountain
88 Tulpan
74 Two Lovers
83 Tyson
83 U2 3D
60 Under Our Skin
69 Unmistaken Child
69 Valentino: The Last Emperor
22 What Goes Up
45 Whatever Works
57 Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 



Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Promise, The
Moonstone Entertainment

Promise, The reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 53 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
4.8 out of 10
based on 26 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 8 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Cecilia Cheung, Dong-Kun Jang, Ye Liu, Cheng Qian, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Nicholas Tse

This fantasy epic tells the love story between a royal concubine and a slave.


GENRE(S): Action  |  Drama  |  Fantasy  |  Foreign  
WRITTEN BY: Chen Kaige  
DIRECTED BY: Chen Kaige  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: December 19, 2006 
Theatrical: December 30, 2005 
RUNNING TIME: 102 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: China / Hong Kong / Japan / South Korea 
LANGUAGE(S): Mandarin (with English subtitles) 

Original title "Mo Gik" or "Wu Ji"; Previously known as "Master of the Crimson Armor"

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
For Kaige, The Promise can't exactly be called a return to form--it's more a return to "Hero" and "House Of Flying Daggers" director Zhang Yimou's form. Either way, it's still glorious.
Read Full Review
90
Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Chen's masterful, deeply perceptive direction of his superb cast is equaled by the film's luminous cinematography, rich yet spare and stylized production and costume design, and rousing score.
Read Full Review
80
New York Magazine David Edelstein
I found The Promise pretty hard to resist. A heady blend of swordplay, somersaults, fairy-tale romance, and computer-generated whoosh.
Read Full Review
75
Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Whether or not the story makes any sense, The Promise promises to transport - and does.
Read Full Review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.
Read Full Review
70
LA Weekly F. X. Feeney
Some critics are badly selling the film short, when the story it tells, measured strictly in terms of emotional power and overall fun, is as moving and pleasurable as any matinee item by Ford, Hawks or Raoul Walsh.
Read Full Review
70
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chen Kaige clearly intended this Chinese fantasy-action spectacle to top Zhang Yimou's "Hero," and I must admit that I prefer it to the earlier movie: the digital effects are sometimes excessive, yet Chen's story of a loyal slave, his master, and a wealthy, seemingly doomed princess is more affecting, especially in the closing stretch.
Read Full Review
67
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Like many of Chen's movies, which are so precise and composed and lush, it's not really emotionally engaging. It is, however, a dazzling and dynamic spectacle that risks being ridiculous to create an unreal world of the romantic imagination.
Read Full Review
63
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
I'm not sure the director should return to this particular genre, whatever you'd call it. But he is, in fact, a real director.
Read Full Review
63
TV Guide Ethan Alter
The mixture of action, drama and romance isn’t as potent, and Kaige’s reliance on subpar special effects hurts the movie. Wu xia fans will still find things to like, but the uninitiated will probably find this slow going.
Read Full Review
60
The New York Times Dana Stevens
The Promise occupies a curious landscape somewhere between opera and cartoon.
Read Full Review
60
Variety Robert Koehler
A mixed bag of near-risible storylines, second-rate CG effects, some fabulous set pieces, somewhat cartoonish martial arts fighting and difficult international casting.
Read Full Review
60
The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
While it aspires to draw the same audiences who admired "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Hero," The Promise is but a pale imitation of those landmark films.
Read Full Review
58
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.
Read Full Review
50
Boston Globe Ty Burr
Has a daft sweep, and if you're in the mood for empty swordplay in baroque settings, purple dialogue delivered with straight faces, and romantic yearnings that never, ever resolve, The Promise may be your cup of oolong.
Read Full Review
50
Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
The actors were mostly nondescript, sometimes noticeably clumsy. Stunt coordinator Dion Lam brought a bit of freshness to the martial arts choreography, but the rest of the film was as stale as a week-old carp on a fish vendor's pushcart.
Read Full Review
50
Village Voice Michael Atkinson
You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.
Read Full Review
50
ReelViews James Berardinelli
The over-the-top acting is forgivable, but the plot's incoherence is not.
Read Full Review
50
Entertainment Weekly Staff (Not credited)
There's a nice Road Runner-cartoon moment when the slave runs really, really fast, carrying the wounded general on his back while dodging an attack of CG bulls. I can't imagine Road Runner was what Chen had in mind for the most expensive movie ever made in China, but then, I was born too late for the time of the snowy eagle.
Read Full Review
50
Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Like its images, The Promise billows through the imagination as it unfolds but it leaves little lasting impression once its last feather has fluttered.
Read Full Review
50
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
So absurdly overproduced that there's even a surfeit of cherry blossoms. By the end they look like litter.
42
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.
Read Full Review
40
Washington Post Stephen Hunter
The movie is full of invasions, assassination attempts, chases and escapes in seemingly random order, the result being completely chaotic.
Read Full Review
38
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything BUT a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection.
Read Full Review
25
San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
The prologue sets a simpleton tone that, distressingly, continues throughout.
Read Full Review
12
New York Post V.A. Musetto
The Promise employs laughable computer effects and second-rate martial-arts fighting to tell the hard-to-figure story of a princess and her three lovers.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 4.8 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

James S. gave it a1:
Note that when it comes to Asian martial arts films, American critics tend to be more lenient because of its novelty, or the assumptions that the incoherent plot lines could be due to "lost in translation". So users should review the review and moderate it down a few grades to be objective. Especially so if you are familiar with this genre of film before it caught on with the west.

Paul K. gave it a4:
Don't believe the hype. While the story may be of interest to some, it is ultimately too cliche. That said, my biggest problem with this film were the visuals. Some of the effects are fine, but a majority are flat out bad. Consistency in the quality of effects would have made Kevin Thomas' quote about this being "one of the most beautiful films imaginable" valid. As it stands, this is not even close to Crouching Tiger, Hero, or Flying Daggers. Wait for video, if you must.

Kai Y. gave it a1:
Cheesy, tacky, corny and thoroughly unbelievable (even by fantasy standards). Tse's rant about how Cheung's theft of a bun from him set him down on the road of evil is the most laughably ridiculous piece of crap ever spouted on screen.

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: iPhone 3G | Fantasy Football | Moneywatch | Antivirus Software | Recipes | E3 2009

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use