Red Cliff
Review
by Anthony Morris
War movies don't often contain all that much actual
war. And not just because war - battles to be exact - are
expensive to film...
The simple fact is, most movie directors these days seem pretty much
incapable of filming action with any kind of spatial awareness.
Without that, a filmed battle becomes... well, the kind of loud garbled
mess that made up the last half hour of Transformers 2.
In modern action movies, the action is just a big
mess of exploding things coming at you from all angles, but actual,
real-life war battles are fought over things:
Take that hill, push the
enemy out of the city, storm the beach, so on and so on. That is
what makes a well made action sequence exciting to watch.
It's not the
explosions and shouting and so on - it works when not only something is at stake but when,
we as an audience, are able to tell which side is getting close to achieving
their goal, and which side is losing the fight.
So if Red
Cliff was directed by anyone else but John Woo you would be perfectly
entitled to have a sinking feeling in your gut at the news that the
final hour is nothing but one long battle, and that the hour and a half
before it is mostly battle scenes as well.
Fortunately John Woo,
even in his last few Hollywood stinkers (yes, even Paycheck) has always
known how to stage action and here in this made-in-China retelling of a
Chinese civil war clash circa 200AD he pulls out all the
stops.
Edited together from the two-part Chinese version,
this is basically a showcase for Woo's action work (presumably much of
the character work hit the cutting room floor), but as that action work
is astounding that's not really a cause for complaint.
You
might think two and a half hours of charging horses, flying arrows,
burning river barges, hurled spears, exploding projectiles and slashing
swords would eventually grow stale.
But there is just enough
character moments between the clashes to give a sense of what's at
stake (plus a decent twist or two), while the clashes themselves are
never less than thrilling examples of action cinema at its
finest.
It has been a good year for action films already, but
Red Cliff is going to be almost impossible to beat.
4
out
of 5
Red Cliff
Australian release: 23rd
July, 2009
Official
Site: Red Cliff
Cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Wei Zhao
Director: John Woo
|
