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100For 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.
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90Chen'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.
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I found The Promise pretty hard to resist. A heady blend of swordplay, somersaults, fairy-tale romance, and computer-generated whoosh.
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75Whether or not the story makes any sense, The Promise promises to transport - and does.
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75In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.
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70Some 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.
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70Chen 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.
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67Like 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.
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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.
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63The 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.
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60While 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.
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60The Promise occupies a curious landscape somewhere between opera and cartoon.
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60A mixed bag of near-risible storylines, second-rate CG effects, some fabulous set pieces, somewhat cartoonish martial arts fighting and difficult international casting.
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58Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.
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50Has 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.
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50The over-the-top acting is forgivable, but the plot's incoherence is not.
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50The 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.
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50Like its images, The Promise billows through the imagination as it unfolds but it leaves little lasting impression once its last feather has fluttered.
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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.
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50You 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.
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50So absurdly overproduced that there's even a surfeit of cherry blossoms. By the end they look like litter.
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42It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.
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40The movie is full of invasions, assassination attempts, chases and escapes in seemingly random order, the result being completely chaotic.
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38Pretty 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.
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25The prologue sets a simpleton tone that, distressingly, continues throughout.
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12The 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.
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