Review of The Red Cliff (1949) by Marko S — 08 Jun 2010

In early third Century China, Prime Minister Cao Cao faces off against Southern rebel Zhou Yu and his outnumbered band of dedicated followers beneath the Red Cliffs of the Yangtze river, in a battle that would become legendary and set the stage for China's Three Kingdoms.

Taking on this assignment for a Chinese audience who knows the story in and out is enough of a task, but nobody ever showed John Woo an action script he couldn't handle, and his result, the most expensive (and profitable) film in Chinese history, is a nearly five-hour extravaganza of battle maneuvers, pyrotechnics, and larger than life characterizations; arguably the biggest war film since 'Return of the King', and certainly comparable to "Avatar" in sweep and scope.

Superstars Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro (the lovesick cops of "Chungking Express" 15 years ago) are on hand as the masterminds behind the rebellion, and outnumbered 8:1 they have some difficult job at hand (though a turn of the winds late in the game makes for a huge advantage in the naval battle), and Fengyi Zhang and Chen Chang are appropriately stoic as rival leaders whose ruling and philosophy styles ultimately set the stage for the war.

With his decades of experience helming modern action films, Woo is capable of staging exciting set pieces, but this set to such a massive scale that even the considerably large cast of extras are all enhanced with computer graphics, but they blend nearly seamlessly with the live action, and the result is a sweeping war film that satisfies the Chinese legend, but never confuses for a western audience; a total winner.