Chen Kaige's The Promise (Wu Ji) Review

Given the lush cinematography of the early stills and trailers and the huge reputation of director Chen Kaige perhaps people can be forgiven for automatically assuming that his Wu Ji (AKA The Promise, AKA The Master of the Crimson Armor) was intended at least partly to be a response to Zhang Yimou's Hero. These are, after all, two big name Chinese directors of the same generation, purveyors of serious art house fare until Zhang shook free of the mold and struck serious international box office gold by dabbling with wuxia. So when we saw those rich colors and the bodies flying through the air is it any surprise that we all assumed Chen was following that same path?

But what people did not expect, what virtually nobody saw coming, was that rather than craft his own wuxia epic Chen was actually setting out to make a fairy tale. And not even a particularly adult fairy tale. Remove one love scene and what you've got is a story of capricious gods, star crossed lovers, super powered slaves and snazzy weaponry suitable for the tween set. And while Chen certainly makes good use of the visual styles the fairy tale allows he also slips into virtually every one of the pot holes that snare most youth oriented film, namely an over reliance on effects, a limp script, and weak characters.

Numerous side plots, a pointlessly over convoluted plot, and a pair of English titles that both entirely miss the main thrust of the film aside, Wu Ji is the tragic story of Qingcheng. When we first meet her Qingcheng is a young girl orphaned by war and forced to scavange food from the corpses of dead soldiers abandoned in the battlefields. But the young Qingcheng catches the eye of the Goddess Manshen, a powerful being who holds the keys to fate, and Manshen makes her an offer: Qingcheng need never go hungry again, she can be wealthy and adored, but if she chooses that fate she will also be cursed to quickly lose everybody she loves. What does a starving child know about love and loss? Precisely nothing, so Qingcheng immediately accepts the offer.

The story jumps forward twenty years and very quickly becomes very complex. Qingcheng has become a princess and is engaged to the King. Wicked warlord Wuhuan lays seige to the king to take Qingcheng from him for reasons known only to himself, and the powerful general Guangming sees an opportunity to save the King, defeat his arch rival, and claim immense personal glory. However, on the road to the King's castle Guangming is attacked by an assassin and severely wounded and so he instructs his slave Kunlun - a mysterious figure who knows nothing about his own past and has the power to run supernaturally fast - to don his fabled Crimson Armor and save both King and Princess while impersonating him. But things go wrong, Kunlun kills the King, Guangming is forced into exile, Qingcheng falls in love with the man she believes is the general but is actually Kunlun, and Wuhuan continues to whine and plot and point at things with his rather amusing hand / rod / scepter / pointer thing.

So there is the basic scenario and the first - and moist significant problem - should be immediately obvious. Wu Ji is, at its heart, a simple tragic love triangle but the film is cluttered with mounds of secondary characters and needless plot points that do little but distract from the main thrust. Every time Chen spends five minutes showing us something trivial like Kunlun outrunning a herd of stampeding bulls - a very bad piece of CG work, that - that's five minutes less to spend giving us a reason to actually care about his characters and many, many minutes are spent on trivial matters. Even stranger is just how seriously Chen treats this trivial moments. Come on, man, you've got an obvious composite shot of a guy running in place and yet somehow outrunning a herd of cattle! Would it kill you to break a smile?

The second problem, as mentioned above, is the over reliance on too frequently shoddy CGI effects. Yes, there are many, many moments where Chen captures truly stunning images on the screen and there are many moments that I would love the chance to see on the big screen, but there are just as many effects shots that belong in mid-grade cable productions and not in the lush fantasy epic that this clearly wants to be.

But as deeply flawed as Wu Ji may be it is still difficult to write off. A bad Chen Kaige film is still a Chen Kaige film, after all, and no matter how clumsy the plotting the work of the master will still inevitably shine through from time to time. The production design is simply stunning and the cinematography, particularly in the natural environments of the first act, is frequently jaw dropping. And when the CGI works - as it does in both Goddess Manshen scenes - it really works.

The biggest plus, however, and by far the most surprising one, is the performance of Hong Kong pop idol Cecilia Cheung as the adult Qingcheng. Cheung has amply demonstrated in the past that she can turn in a strong performance when given strong material to work with, most notably in One Night In Mongkok. However, she still makes more than her share of fluff, mailing in performances that are nothing more than her pop persona put on screen. With Wu Ji, however, Cheung shows that she is becoming one of those rare things: someone who can transcend the weakness of the material. She is so much better than everyone else in this film, so much better than she has any right to be working with this script, that it is stunning. It's in the body, it's in the eyes, it's in the tired tones of her voice: while everyone else is striking poses Cheung has become the character. If she's not careful people might go and start taking her seriously as an actress. Is she the next Maggie Cheung? Not yet, but there's a fighting chance that she could become just that, a possibility that would have been considered laughable just a few years ago.

As for the just released Hong Kong DVD, this is likely as good as The Promise will ever appear on disc. With their latest batch of titles Deltamac has impressed as one of the finest Hong Kong outfits going, both in terms of quality and English-friendliness and this is no exception. The packaging is beautiful, the transfer and sound pristine, and the entire package - including all of the special features - is English subtitled. They've even formatted it for all regions so coding is a non issue.

While I would hesitate to call The Promise a 'good' film in any meaningful sense it is certainly an interesting failure, one that falls apart because it reaches too high, which is a situation I'll take over safe mediocrity any day.