For most of his career, Jet Li Lian-Jie has not generally done a lot for me in his lead roles--especially in his HK films. He's always been 'pretty good', but he just never seems to deliver that commanding screen presence that his roles demand. I think of OUATIC and KFCM, and what always comes to mind are the actors around Li that did more to make those films truly special than indeed Li did. A lot of it may simply be Li's personality and appearance. Some of it is very high expectations as Li's reputation preceeds him. By miles. He is essentially a living Chinese folk hero--as well he should be. But a great martial arts actor? Hardly.

I think that opinion started to change when I saw Zhang Yimou's 'Hero'. Here was a Mandarin film where Li played a role well suited for his appearance and personality--much more than when he played Fong Sai Yuk or Huang Fei Hong (to mix romanizations, as well as metaphors). And, maybe, in fact ironically, he seems better suited to playing these more morally nuanced characters.

So if Hero was Li's 'coming out' film for me, this film was certainly his payoff. Li has a screen presence here that has heretofore been unseen. We have a reasonably well developed three-dimensional character that we really care about. We have emotions. We have philosophy. We have...a story! That the film has martial arts sequences that are easily among the best choreographed of Li's and Yuen Wo-Ping's illustrious careers, respectively, is simply icing on the cake...and indeed is as expected.

This is Chinese martial arts cinema at its very best: a film that demands repeated viewings.