[PTeppic]

You can't fool an honest man,
Don't end a sentence with a preposition,
"I" before "E" except after "C":
Time for my review.


(If you haven't seen the film, you won't "get" the above...)

"Curse" is a gorgeous film, as you would expect from Zhang Yimou. The colours are rich, deep and flowing throughout the film: stunning reds, vibrant greens and blues as well as voluminous and expansive gold upon gold. For all that it's quite a simple film, of royal discord in tenth century China, set against the stiff formality of life in the palace.

Despite his appearance as the Emperor, Chow Yun Fat has remarkably little action in his role, save a small set piece testing one of his returning sons. Prince Jai, conversely (played by Jay Chou) takes the lion's share of the individual fighting scenes, where such take place. This partially reflects the nature of the film: this is no "Crouching Tiger" or "Flying Daggers", more a drama that happens to feature a sword-play at times. Such fighting generally falls to faceless assassins, royal guards and a cast of thousands in the royal armies. Think Helm's Deep filmed using a living Terracotta Army. Those scenes are generally classical fighting with spears and pole-arms, bows and arrows, shields and the massed ranks of ten thousand extras. There is no Wushu here, rather how-so, with a Ninjutsu-like, or perhaps -lite, band of assassins with remarkable abilities to slide down or swing from ropes, clearly oblivious to the needs for anchorage or the principles of the pendulum.

The presence of the armed masses forms the culmination of the slow-burning plot to topple the Emperor, the story unraveling to reveal palace jealousies, treachery, lies, long-held secrets and revenge. Overlooking the holes you could drive the army through it's still gorgeous, it's all exquisitely played, of course, with an eye to the intricacies of the situation, but for me plodded a little.