"Hidden Blade," a gorgeous and empty Chinese espionage thriller, follows a series of chaotic vignettes about war, which remains hellish. During ham-handed, quasi-impressionistic conversations, which are occasionally interrupted by graphic and perfunctory bloodshed, studiously aloof Communist spies either work with or wear down their fair-weather Japanese allies. Because the plot isn't presented in chronological or sequential order, the episodic sketches quickly become monotonous; jumps in time from 1945 to 1941 and then forward to 1944 are a distracting overcompensation for an otherwise lifeless chain of impersonal betrayals, cold-blooded murders, and unbelievable moping from all involved.


Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who played Mr. He in "In the Mood for Love," plays Mr. He, one of many ill-fated spies who actually serve the Chinese Communists while also appearing to collaborate with the Japanese—most notably the haughty Nipponese official Watanabe (Hiroyuki Mori)—and President Wang's puppet government in Manchuria. Mr. He has formed an alliance with the impressionable Mr. Ye (Wang Yibo), who pursues and retraces He's steps in order to obtain more information for too many masters. Both He and Ye try to appease the increasingly irritable Watanabe, but he's too much of a stock villain to pose a significant threat. Watanabe's orders continue to be unjust, and the consequences of his actions are brutal and, yawn, destabilizing.


Meanwhile, Tony Leung suggests an earthier and largely unexplored route into this sadsack arthouse drama with his attentive eyes and endless cigarettes. The plot's narrow scope and free-associative structure are telling, given that it begins in 1938, when Japanese pilots and Chinese collaborators bombed the Chinese city of Guangzhou, and ends in 1946, months after the war ends. In this way, viewers are forced to focus on the characters' exhausting struggle against the cruel Japanese, whose attack on Guangzhou leaves one main character mourning their innocent brother, who dies alongside his adorable Shiba Inu named Roosevelt. However, the film's big, state-approved climax is exactly what it is: an execution portrayed as a fist-pumping triumph, complete with one major character revealing to the other the true secret of his success—he, too, is a Communist.


So perhaps it's not surprising to see Leung's star power wasted in such a drab genre exercise, whose high-toned cinematography, handsome period costumes, and nostalgic production design only serve to highlight how shallow and unlovable everything else is. "Hidden Blade" creates dramatic tension through elliptical and overly clipped scenes.


The filmmakers never stop telling you what their film is about without ever making you care about He, Ye, or Watanabe, or any of the secondary characters caught in their tangled webs, such as He's love interest, Mrs. Chen (Zhou Xun), who is inevitably threatened with sexual violence. Almost every action and line of pseudo-abstract dialogue casually allude to major events; "Hidden Blade" rarely slows down long enough to consider potential emotional ramifications.


Watanabe is the type of villain who brags about his teeth and makes empty threats. And Mr. He's the doomed lickspittle, whose faith in his peers is shaken every time they prove to be as faithless and amoral as they, uh, constantly tell us they are? "I can only go until the end of the road," one guy says, sounding like the second coming of Yogi Berra. Another man threatens an unarmed victim, gloating to Timothy Dalton, saying, "To make things easier, I think I'll have to kill you." "Never let emotions get in your way," a third character warns, apparently on behalf of their chilly, but genre-savvy creators.


As Mr. He, Leung creeps through hotel corridors and stares out backlit windows, smoking constantly to distract himself from complicating thoughts. He has far too much screen time with Wang, whose Mr. Ye turns out to be the film's true protagonist because he is the one who must confront the plot's central moral vacuum. Unfortunately, Wang doesn't look as soulful when he cries—which he has to do in a couple of key scenes—and his stares are never as long or meaningful as Leung's slight, seductive little smiles. Leung runs rings around his character, an elusive and thus dangerous mercenary; Wang struggles to convince us that someone could be so naive or delusory as to sleepwalk through their own frequently jeopardized life, especially when it's presented as a self-pitying highlight reel.


The fight between these two main characters is as long and exhausting as Roddy Piper and Keith David's brawl in "They Live." You'd think that this blockbuster would force the makers of "Hidden Blade" to shift emotional gears for a while. But this feel-good pot-boiler doesn't work that way, leaving one wondering why you'd entice cinephiles with sexy smoking Tony Leung and then do nothing with him.



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