Went to see this one on the big screen yesterday with Myles (at his suggestion), and it was pretty good, though not great. Impossible to avoid comparisons with Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so here goes: more dramatic than either, edging towards (and, in the climax, falling into) melodrama; more visceral and less beautiful, both in its fight scenes and generally, than CTHD in particular (all things being relative); and (related to the foregoing) less elegiac and poetic than either (CTHD being pretty much the last word in that respect, at least in this genre, as far as I'm concerned).
But these aren't criticisms of Flying Daggers, even though their cumulative effect was to cause me to enjoy the film less than either of those other two - rather, they're reflections of a somewhat different emphasis. And, really, the similarities to those earlier films probably outweigh the differences. For one thing, Flying Daggers is easily as picturesque and sumptuously-shot as both; naturally, given that it's again directed by Zhang Yimou, it's particularly similar to Hero in this respect, for he's painting with the same palette of vibrant, striking colours and tints. There are a few stunning set pieces (Zhang Zi Yi's stylised dance in the echo game near the beginning and the battle scene amongst the bamboos come to mind), and the individual fight scenes will probably probably linger longer in the mind than those in Hero or Crouching Tiger. And I thought that the three leads were good, effectively evoking the intensely personal, internal conflicts faced by each of the characters while also embodying the grandiose, semi-mythical traits that the film's underlying logic required of them.
Where Flying Daggers fell down a bit for me, though, was in its pacing and, to a lesser extent, its plot. While I respond to these kinds of films more for their overall visual and emotional effect than on a structural/intellectual level, and certainly don't expect any particularly developed plot or narrative, Flying Daggers lost some of its fluency and sweep amidst the disruption of the stops and starts of the central romance between Jin and Mei. Still, as I said earlier, all up certainly an enjoyable film.
