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Promise has style, beauty, doesn't satisfy
Movie Review: The Promise
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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out of 4 stars.
Writer-director Chen Kaige sets his story “3,000 years ago in the future, somewhere in Asia.” Magic is not uncommon in this time and it’s a place where gods and goddesses co-exist with mortals. Taken on its own incredible, fairytale plane, The Promise engages and entertains, but never truly touches.
The fantastic events begin as Qingcheng, a small girl in rags, roams a battlefield covered by fresh corpses. She pries a piece of bread from a dead soldier’s hand. Before she can escape with her prize, an arrogant child of a general takes it from her. When the quick-thinking girl expresses admiration for the boy’s helmet, he removes it to show her. Once the helmet is in her hands, she strikes the boy with it and retrieves the bread.
A few minutes later Qingcheng accidentally drops the bread in a lake. As she despairs over her loss, her fate changes again. The goddess Manshen (Chen Hong) ascends gracefully from the water and makes the peasant girl a proposition.
Qingcheng may live the life of a beauty above all beauties, dwelling in luxury and adored by powerful men. In exchange for this life, however, she will lose every man she loves. The girl agrees to the terrible bargain and the goddess makes good on her promise.
Twenty years later, Princess Qingcheng (Cecilia Cheung) is the lover of the king. Her beauty can stop an army in its tracks. Two men, Guangming (Hiroyuki Sanada), a great general who leads the Crimson Army, and Kunlun (Jang Dong-Gun), a groveling slave who dares not even stand in the general’s presence, are each fated to fall in love with the princess.
Befitting his imperial status, the general is a ruthless, arrogant man. He doesn’t hesitate to send men to their deaths, especially if they’re slaves. But Kunlun is no ordinary slave. In an amazing demonstration of speed, he escapes imminent death. The latter scene shows Chinese computer-generated effects can’t complete with the realism of Western effects. Yet The Promise already is such a fantastic tale, the sub-standard effects distract only temporarily from the film’s overall entertainment.
The Promise lacks resonance from a story point of view, but it has much style and visual beauty. The movie’s poetic director of photographer, Peter Pau, previously helmed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film’s cast does good work, too. The actors never let the fact that they’re in a film that exists somewhere between fairytale and comic book hinder their seriousness.
