The Promise | Review

Kaige uses road most traveled for fantasy martial art pic.

If it’s Crouching Tigers or Flying Daggers that one craves then there are many elements (sword play, mid-air collisions) here in Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige’s ambitious project that will satisfy thirsty martial art admirers, but the pickiest fans of the genre will strive to find any sense of renewal. There’s an air of redundancy in a project that was supposed to have it all, after all, the film has the advantage of having several predecessors in which to cut out a template and then over a notch above. Unlike his peers, the fifth-generation master whose humbled beginnings gave Western audiences a grassroots look into stories of mainland China ventures off into a territory that quite frankly is perhaps a little too foreign for the filmmaker, the fantasy world that The Promise proposes is rather convoluted.

Wrapped in themes of mythology, destiny, servitude and betrayal – Kaige’s tale takes on a slave loyal to his master premise with a good versus evil formula crossed with an elaborate love triangle where love is the equivalent to poison. The problematic with things in a series of three is that the romantic element gets diluted, the fighting sequences aren’t as charged and the humor feels forced. Filled with a bag of CGI tricks and the sort of comedy found in Kung Fu Hustle, Kaige enjoys speeding up the frame to Baron Munchausen speeds or halting motions to The Matrix-style freezes. The “running of the bulls” sequence is offered in a cartoonish and frenzied surrealism – the hurried design takes the romance out of the images and makes it hard to appreciate the overall pacing. The film gets some relief but is not saved by some decent art production value – the girl in a giant birdcage that recalls of a certain Channel ad campaign, or the lavish costume and set design are worth a look at, but the camera aesthetics and the rapid shooting of the sequences doesn’t give much room to appreciate the finer elements.

While its his most financially ambitious project yet and the costliest film ever made in China, this is not exactly his first foray into larger production with the closest relative in style and production value similarly found in his 90’s film The Emperor of the Assassin. Perhaps audiences who don’t yet speak Mandarin or have zero familiarity with the legend will miss out in the film’s subtle implications of the tale, but principally one would need an accompanying score card to keep up with a storyline that fast-forwards through the courting phase, and which arrives at point C without going through B. Perhaps this is why the Weinstein’s who once owned the rights and called it by the name of Master of the Crimson Armor, decided to drop the property. With a lack of marvel and magic, The Promise promises to disappoint.

Rating 1 stars