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PLOT: In a pact with a goddess, a young Chinese woman trades away all chance of love for a life of riches -- leaving her in a quandary when she falls in love with a masked soldier in Crimson Armour who saves her life.
It isn't surprising that art-house Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) would be an uncomfortable fit with the action movie genre.
What is surprising is where exactly he falls short in the soap-opera/wannabe-spectacle The Promise.
It turns out he knows exactly what to do cinematically with a $35 million budget (one of the biggest in the history of Chinese cinema). He frames a battle scene with flair and oblique camera points of view, practically caressing the mountains and mesas and festooning them with a cast of thousands of medieval warriors and House Of Flying Daggers-worthy flocks of arrows.
In the movie's more delicate moments, as when the young Princess Qingcheng first makes the acquaintance of the Goddess Manshen (whose blessing/curse comes to define the Princess's life), beautiful points of light dapple the screen.
The Promise, in other words, is a great movie to sit back and watch. Unfortunately, it also comes with a story.
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A pseudo-fable written by Chen himself, The Promise is a mistaken-identity soap opera so ham-handed that the last act in particular evokes laughter.
The Promise opens on a corpse-strewn battlefield, where the aforementioned child Qingcheng is caught by an arrogant young boy as she pilfers from the dead. She promises to be his slave if he lets her live, and then flees. The meeting between goddess and princess follows, with Qingcheng agreeably trading all chance of love for the promise of riches.
Flash ahead a few decades, and we meet Gen. Guangming (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his superpowered servant Kunlun (Dong-Kun Jang). They're being stalked by the shrouded wraith Snow Wolf, who shares Kunlun's powers of super-speed -- both hailing from the mystical Land Of Snow.
En route to rescue the Emperor from a revolt by the evil baron Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse), the general is seriously wounded in an encounter with Snow Wolf, and dresses Kunlun in his Crimson Armour to carry out the mission in disguise.
The mission is botched, but Kunlun does save the princess, who thinks she's been saved by the general... and well, you can guess the rest.
The soap opera drags on, with everybody but Snow Wolf in love with the princess (and with her not knowing quite who she's supposed to be in love with). I don't think Chen knows either, because, plotwise, he pretty much throws his hands in the air with a melodramatic stab-me/stab-you climax that evoked laughs at the screening I was at.
BOTTOM LINE: Fish gotta fly, birds gotta swim, and arthouse directors gotta try their hands at mega-budget action films. Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) frames a battle scene with flair and makes a cast of thousands of warriors look like a million bucks ($35 mil, actually). But the awkward soap opera/mistaken-identity plot crawls along, culminating in a stab-me/stab-you climax that evokes laughter.
(This film is rated 14-A)