After 15 years expertly playing the Hollywood game, the Hong Kong director John Woo returns to his roots, and to form. And what a relief it clearly is for the world’s slickest action director to spill copious amounts of blood and explosives back on native soil.
Red Cliff is set in Han Dynasty China, in the year AD208. It’s a world in which power-crazed despots recite their poetry to an appreciative audience of generals and warlords, then casually decapitate unfortunate messengers; a world where powerful warriors can be unmanned by a beautiful woman who makes a mean cup of tea. Brilliant military strategists from rival kingdoms cement their alliance, not through diplomacy, but through an impassioned duet on Chinese classical musical instruments. It sounds a little like somebody sawing a harp into small pieces but it’s a deliciously over-the-top moment.
The film is loosely and colourfully based on a genuine historical period, a period that culminated in the most famous battle in Chinese history. But Woo’s approach embraces the mythic and the fantastic — his is not exactly a kid gloves attitude to factual accuracy. This is a thigh-slapping, rip-roaring yarn, in which brotherhood and honour are pitted against rapacious greed and lust.
Representing the latter camp is the ambitious and bloodthirsty Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi). Having conquered the north and reduced the emperor to little more than an impotent puppet, Cao Cao has set his sights on the Xu kingdom to the west. After a crushing defeat, the Xu ruler Liu Bei realises that his only hope is to form an alliance with the Wu kingdom to the south. To this end, he dispatches his brilliant military adviser Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to meet the Wu Viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung). An alliance is forged, but more importantly, a friendship and mutual respect develops between the two men.
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All this, however, is merely scene-setting for the real point of the movie — the ballet of impeccably choreographed combat that fills every frame. Woo’s camera takes wing and swoops like one of his ubiquitous white doves, the better to appreciate the scale and ambition of this, the most expensive Chinese-language film yet made. He combines martial philosophy with gore-splattered hand-to-hand combat; ingenious military strategising with huge explosions and sizzling oceans full of burning boats. This vast spectacle is rooted in a battle of wits between three brilliant men. Even Woo’s cornier tendencies — the aforementioned doves, a risible CGI rainbow — work better here than in his Hollywood films.
What’s slightly disappointing is that Woo has been persuaded to tailor this version of the film for a Western audience. Chinese audiences will get to see the film in two parts, with a total running time of four hours, which admittedly might have proved heavy going for British viewers. That said, we probably didn’t need the clumsy American narration that bogs down the opening of the film with a potted guide to 1st-century Chinese history.
15, 148mins