William Bibbiani Reviews John Woo’s Red Cliff!
I’m no mathematician, but I often wonder what they think of movies like Red Cliff, 300, or The Mighty Ducks. If they’re anything like me they’re deeply, deeply confused. John Woo’s latest film marks the hyperbolillionth time that underdogs have defied overwhelming odds against forces of superior strength and numbers, which means that, clearly, our system of evaluating these odds needs revising. From now on, I declare the vast armies and sports teams of poor, defenseless fascist leaders the real underdogs, and I eagerly await films depicting hapless generals with limitless resources struggling valiantly to defeat a half dozen brainiacs holed up in a bungalow or something with only three boomerangs and a jar of Tiddlywinks to their name, only to miraculously emerge victorious over those few horrible rebels at the very end thanks to an ingenious last-minute plan involving tactical nuclear weapons. By Hollywood’s standards, that would really defy the odds…
But John Woo’s mostly excellent new film Red Cliff wasn’t made in Hollywood. And that’s a good thing, because the studio system wasn’t terribly kind to John Woo, whose early Chinese films like The Killer, Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled helped redefine action filmmaking in the 80’s and 90’s. Woo’s gritty crime stories balanced out his balletic action sequences and overpowering themes of heterosexual male bonding, but Hollywood didn’t really go for any of that. Woo’s American films suffered from tacked on love subplots (never his strong suit), ridiculous plotlines (which made his choreography feel even further over the top), and poorly-realized relationships between his heroes and villains. (Face/Off did kind of rock, though.) John Woo ended up directing a straight-to-TV remake of Lost in Space in 2004, after which he apparently decided to rethink his career. Wouldn’t you?
“…the bad news is, John Woo wants to water ski.”
John Woo brought his new Hollywood knowhow to mainland China to shoot Red Cliff, based on the classic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Though relatively unfamiliar to Westerners, Red Cliff has been adapted to film, television and videogames on multiple occasions, and necessitated two feature films to adapt properly for Chinese audiences this time around. Everyone else in the world gets a single 2 1/2 hour movie culled from those two longer films, resulting in a loss of around an hour and a half of content. Only the shorter version was made available for review, which doesn’t really seem fair to me, but luckily for all of us this truncated version of Red Cliff plays well on its own. The plot moves quickly and wraps up effectively, and only a few awkward scene transitions appear to imply missing footage.
About that plot: A.D. 208 was apparently a pretty big year for China. General Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi of Farewell My Concubine) coerces the Emperor into approving a war against two underdog warlords: Liu Bei (You Yong of Breaking News) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen of Happy Together), who are actually totally cool guys who don’t deserve this kind of persecution. To combat Cao Cao’s superior forces, these warlords enlist the master strategist (and kind of Gandalf-ish) Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro of The Chungking Express) and noble war hero Zhou Yu (Tony Leung, also of Chungking Express, reuniting with John Woo for the first time since Bullet in the Head). What follows is an epic battle of wits… when it isn’t an actual battle of epic battling. Clever strategies, last minute cavalry charges and badass action the likes of which John Woo hasn’t given us in well over a decade are sure to please action fans of any ilk, in what can only be called a return to form for the once-revered director.
“Look, we paid for the arrows, so we’re going to show the arrows!”
Sadly, Hollywood found one last way to screw John Woo over in the form of a tacked-on English voice-over at the beginning of the film that starts Red Cliff out on an incredibly sour note. The information provided is vital to understanding the plot, but the English language voice-over is not, particularly as the American actor was apparently directed to sound like he was recording a throwaway History Channel documentary. Emotionless but still bombastic, this extremely ill-advised addition to the film is incredibly distracting and raised serious fears that the film would be badly dubbed rather than subtitled, which wasn’t the case but only made the voice-over’s inclusion more confusing. What did this American have to do with the story? Red Cliff itself has no voice-overs, and if it did they probably would have been by a Chinese character who actually had an emotional connection to the impressive events unfolding on-screen, and not some American guy who clearly couldn’t care less. It’s disconcerting that someone could buy the rights to such an epic piece of badassery and yet have so little respect for the material. Luckily, the voice-over ends 10-15 minutes into the film and never returns, and the memory of said voice-over finally fades 15-30 minutes after that, leaving approximately two hours of the film thoroughly, enjoyably unmarred.
Audiences expecting the four hour, uncut version of Red Cliff are going to be pretty “tea”-ed off.
Come to think of it, Red Cliff really is an underdog story, since audiences had pretty much written off John Woo’s career until now. Old fans scorned will find the macho bonding and brutal action they’ve been missing, and younger audiences who may only have been familiar with Windtalkers or Mission: Impossible II will be suitably impressed enough to seek out his earlier (and still better) films. Yes, John Woo is back… in China, where (apparently) he can make better films.
Red Cliff, a Magnet Release, directed John Woo, screenplay by John Woo & Khan Chan & Kuo Cheng & Sheng Heyu, from the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Guanzhong Luo, stars Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zang Fengyi, Chang Chen, Zhao Wei & introducing Chiling Lin, opens in theatrical release on November 20th, 2009. Currently available in Video on Demand.
