Eye Candy #277 - "Red Cliff Part 2"

Red Cliff Part 2: Better than part 1, with less of the excess that populated Part 1 (which isn’t to say that it’s excess free). The largest portion of the film is taken up by the immediate lead-up to the battle between Zhou Yu and Liu Bei on one side and Cao Cao and his cronies on the other, at Chi Bi (the “Red Cliff” of the title). These include various vignettes of the “good” guys of Zhou Yu and his friends, as Sun Shangxiang (Vickie Zhao) reconnoiters the enemy camp and befriends a simpleton soldier in Cao Cao’s ranks, Zhuge Liang gathering the enemies arrows to use against them, and using subterfuge to get Cao Cao to doubt and then execute some of his own generals, followed by the battle itself, complete with fire boat charge. A stunt man was killed in the process of filming that segment and, after having seen it, I’m surprised more weren’t. The prevalence of fire is so great, it’s damn near careless. A tighter film than part 1, but still unnecessarily padded, time-wise. The outcome, for anyone familiar with the story, is no surprise – good triumphs over evil and everyone gets their own character in the “Dynasty Warriors” video game. After completing the whole shebang (or whatever the Chinese equivalent of “shebang” is), I can say that “Red Cliff”, while good, is not great, nor is it my favorite John Woo film or as good as the superior “The Killer” and “Hard Boiled” – much of the dialogue is trite, many of characters are fairly shallow. That’s not to say that I want Woo to abandon any future historical efforts, there’s just so much baggage tied to that genre (and literally decades of film) to contend with and rise above in any effort, and I don’t feel he was wholly successful here (it also could be his reliance on actors who tend to show up in these sorts of films frequently, like Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung). Woodchuck sez, “Good, not great”