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Promise, The
EMAILPRINTMoonstone Entertainment

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 26 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 8 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Drama | Fantasy | Foreign
Written by: Chen Kaige
Directed by: Chen Kaige
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 30, 2005
DVD: December 19, 2006
Running Time: 102 minutes, Color
Origin: China / Hong Kong / Japan / South Korea
Summary
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.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: The Emperor and the Assassin Together
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database
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...
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 >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 >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 >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Whether or not the story makes any sense, The Promise promises to transport - and does.
Read Full Review >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 >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 >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 >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 >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 >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 >The New York Times Dana Stevens
The Promise occupies a curious landscape somewhere between opera and cartoon.
Read Full Review >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 >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 >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.
Read Full Review >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 >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 >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 >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The over-the-top acting is forgivable, but the plot's incoherence is not.
Read Full Review >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 >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 >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
So absurdly overproduced that there's even a surfeit of cherry blossoms. By the end they look like litter.
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 >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 >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 >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
The prologue sets a simpleton tone that, distressingly, continues throughout.
Read Full Review >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
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.
