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Of all of Tsui Hark's movies, this is the one that seems most like art. Here, he abandons a large measure of the artifice of his previous period fantasies and instead substitutes an unerring camera placement and precise motion of bodies. One can argue that the directors Hark fostered in his heyday, and, indeed, the entire Hong Kong movie industry itself, passed Hark by over time. Here, we see Hark taking his own back. This is Hark by way of Wong Kar Wai. There are times when the action sequences here resemble the great set pieces in Kurosawa's samurai movies--the direction is that good. This gets my vote as best martial arts film ever made, not because it has the best martial arts action on film (it probably doesn't, as good as the set pieces here are), but because it means something.

This is a dark story of lost love and revenge, told in flashback as the opium dream of an old woman who was once one of the young lovers. There is an unabashed eroticism in her appraisal of the two young men who work for her blacksmith father, and an acutely observed humanity in the way she plays them against each other until she loses both of them as violent times engulf her way of life. And even if the action sequences here lack the virtuosity of a Bruce Lee or the balls out insanity of a Jackie Chan, the violence here packs a greater punch because it is not kinesis for the sake of kinesis, but the outward expression of inner passions, the reflections of a world clearly well and gone into chaos. Which is not to say that it isn't dazzling. It is. In spades.