A very good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a really interesting director (Zhang Yimou) and a pretty cool cast (Chow Yun-fat, Gong Li), I was quite eager to check it out. Eventually, I was actually really positively surprised by this movie and it was much better than I expected. Apparently, most of the critics thought it was decent feature but still a lesser effort compared to Zhang Yimou’s previous prestigious work. The fact that I haven’t seen most of Yimou’s older work (except for his directing debut ‘Hong gao liang’ and ‘Qiu Ju da guan si’ ) maybe made that I was more able to enjoy this movie for what it was. I mean, first of all, the whole thing looked really gorgeous. Furthermore, I'm a big fan of Gong Li and I thought she was awesome in this movie but the rest of the cast did a fine joob as well. Finally, even though I have to admit that it was very often quite over the top, I thought that the story was actually rather fascinating. To conclude, I really liked this movie a lot and it is definitely worth a look, especially if are interested in Asian movies.

8/10