Romance Of The Three Kingdoms. Anytime someone adapts this into a film, it’s bound to HUGE. It’s after all one of the most important works of Chinese literature. Daniel Lee’s Three Kingdoms: Resurrection Of The Dragon is indeed huge. It’s star-studded – Andy Lau, Sammo Hung, Maggie Q.
Unfortunately, it’s also emotionally flat.
The powerful war epic about three battling kingdoms in ancient China is logically too huge to be adapted completely into a two-hour film. As such, Three Kingdoms feels like a four-hour film crammed into two hours. The books are so rich that you can pick literally any part of it and develop it into a standalone film. Three Kingdoms has as its focus, the story of Zhao Zilong’s (Andy Lau) rise to power.
You’d wish the film would slow down and take whatever time’s needed to flesh out the characters and their relationships, but I suspect there might be a three- or four-hour version somewhere in Daniel Lee’s head, or that one day we might see a full-fledged version on DVD. It does feel like so.
Because of its lack of breathing space, the film scores zero on its emotional chart, and the story comes across more like a dry recounting of history. Even so, Three Kingdoms is gorgeously stylish, its art direction so attentive to period and design details that it would be a delight for fans of history, legends and myths to see the Five Generals come to life on screen or the beautiful armours and costumes and various other eye-pleasing materials.
These days with so many period epics on the way or already released, you can literally create a checklist for their requisites. Beautiful costumes: check. Stylish weapons: check. Breathtaking landscapes: check. Armies of thousands: check. Exciting martial arts and action sequences?
The action sequences here are messy and hard to see. Most times they’re either shot against the sun or deliberately blurred that it’s hard to tell who’s fighting who. They’re also closely shot and purposely disorienting. Director Lee seems to have Wong Kar-wai Ashes Of Time aspirations, but Ashes Of Time’s style is a necessary component of the story, and in Three Kingdoms, the blurry action isn’t. As such, Sammo Hung’s action choreography is pretty much wasted.
Ultimately it’s all style but zero on emotional connection and mild on adrenaline.
Damn. Sounds like a major missed chance!
just like that Kelly Chen thing, again, we've got a modern hottie playing in a period piece. Maggie Cheung could pull off modern and period epics but Maggie Q? I have my doubts (though this sounds better than the Yen/Chen/Lai thing).
I see this in too many action sequences of late where they try to bring a chaotic sensibility to it to make up for the low budget and not enough time to figure out choreography, geography and logistics. So it's essentially lets shoot something frenetic and hope it as a whole adds up as something greater than its pieces.
Perhaps they should have gone with Kuleshov Effect for the action on their limited budget :)
Yeah they really need to stop making these for a while.
Maggie Q is surprisingly not bad as a vixen in a period drama. much much much better than Kelly. in fact, all the actors were good.
Damn, was looking forward to this and Empress, but both seem to be missable. Think I'll still catch this if only to see Andy Lau in action, always been a fan of his stuff.