"Tragic Hero" is a strange movie. It has all the ingredients for a really great movie: big fights, big explosions, a competent director, Chow Yun-Fat in the lead role, and a fairly believeable story-line. But somehow - we, as watchers, just don't care. It doesn't matter how many bullets they pump into Chow Yun-Fat, either; by the finale I was yawning and wishing they'd finish him off quickly so the movie would at last be over.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly what causes this complete lack of audience involvement; my guess is that it's several different elements. For a start, the screen-time and story-line seems to have been spread over too many characters, rather than giving us one strong, central chracter we could sympathise with. And also, the supposedly "main" chracter, played by Chow yun-Fat, is given almost no depth at all - in fact, the only chracterisation in the movie seems to have been given to Shing Fui On, who hardly has any time onscreen at all.

All in all - a pretty terrible movie. Don't watch it unless you have a sudden urge to be bored out of your skull for an hour and a half while you could be watching something far better.

2/10