Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- Goofball combination of European art-house meandering self-importance and flying-by-wires chop-sockey popcorn.
The flying-by-wires martial arts is fairly good. Two problems: One, you can see this sort of stuff in hundreds of Hong Kong karate pictures. It's such a popular bit of silliness that the subgenre even has its own name -- wusha, I think, meaning "flying film" or something like that.
Two, they overdo it. Flying and super-jumping is lots and lots of fun when it's used sparingly, to punctuate action. It was just great when Luke Skywalker flies out of the Carbonite Machine, for example.
But here, combatants natural mode of locomotion is flight. It gets boring. And you begin nit-picking: You begin "seeing" where the hidden wires are, and figuring out precisely how they're doing it, and you begin noticing little mistakes, like people mis-timing their jumps or footwork as they scamper along rooftops.
The less said about the rest, the better. The film is a portentuous stew of dangling plotlines and "What the fuck is going on?" flashbacks that turn into long mini-movies having very little to do with the main plot. (BTW, what the fuck *IS* the main plot here?) There's a good character, Lo, who is suddenly introduced in a fifteen minute long flashback in the middle of the film, but then never really reappears again. (Okay, he reappears briefly, then is sent away to a mountain retreat for the rest of the film, then reappears briefly to do nothing again.)
Do yourself a favor: Skip this art-house take on wushua and rent a bona-fide wushua chop-sockey flick.
Errata:
It's not wushua, it's wuxia, which translates as "flying people."
Director and producer Tsui Hark is the man most associated with the genre. Some Tsui wuxia films: Ghost Story, Swordsman II, Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, and New Dragon Inn. Others: The Bride with White Hair, The East is Red, Deadful Melody, The New Legend of Shaolin, and Burning Paradise.
John Carpenter's "Big Trouble in Little China" was an Americanized homage to Tsui's Zu.
