Chen Kaige, a veteran Chinese filmmaker primarily known for conventional and staid melodramas such as Farewell My Concubine, attempts to hop on the Crouching Tiger bandwagon with this lavishly mounted martial arts fantasy. The results are often stunning on a purely visual level, but you'd best soak up every available ounce of pleasure from those amazing images. It's unlikely that you'll be able to make hide nor hair out of anything else.
Budgeted at a reported $35 million, The Promise (aka Master of the Crimson Armor) is the most expensive movie ever produced in mainland China, and Chen seems determined to show us that we're getting our money's worth. The filmmaker crams the screen with furious action, vivid color, ornate details and wall-to-wall special effects, but forgets to give us a story worth caring about. The narrative, such as it is, mostly consists of bits and pieces filtered from earlier and more successful Chinese productions — a beautiful princess torn between two suitors, vast armies squaring off for obscure reasons, various characters obsessed with attaining immortality, lots of flying around — but The Promise doesn't assemble the elements in a particularly coherent way or provide them with a central focus.
The movie is not without its pleasures, but they consist almost entirely of a series of spectacular set pieces that don't quite connect with one another. Even more problematic, Chen undercuts the power of the film's greatest asset, its imagery, with an over-reliance on GGI effects that often look unintentionally cheesy and occasionally even somewhat silly. Factor in editing rhythms aren't always as smooth as they should be and transitions between scenes that often seem minimal, and The Promise only sporadically captures the elegant poetry of movies like Crouching Tiger or Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Chen's obvious influences. Stars Cecelia Cheung, Nicholas Tse, Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong Gun and Liu Ye.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2006.