Ticks all the boxes, in Bold. Bigger in almost every sense than Stephen Chow's earlier Shaolin Soccer, but somehow still not quite as good.
The same key ingredients are there: (very) wicked humour, ecstatic, effect-driven visual invention, and all-round escalation. And when the action moves to Pig Sty alley it looks like it will also have the same soft heart, but sadly this hardens by degrees along the way.
If Hero was martial high-art, this is martial postmodern pop-art. It floats on a shimmering surface of multidimensional borrowings, without ever showing signs of sinking back into arch derivativeness like Tarantino's Kill Bill.
The harpist assassins are genius.
V remarked that it was often like watching a cartoon with real people and that the effect was almost nightmarish.
It's a while since I have seen a film with such enormous potential to be influential on our future viewing tastes. The New York Times reports today that "some of the biggest movie studios are now scrambling onto the mainland and planning to invest more than $150 million over the next few years in China's burgeoning film industry."
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