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THE PROMISE
Directed by: Chen Kaige.
Produced by: Chen Hong, Han Sanping & Ernst Stroh.
Written by: Chen Kaige & Zhang Tan.
Director of Photography: Peter Pau.
Music by: Klaus Badelt.
Released by: Warner Independent.
Language: Mandarin with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: China/Hong Kong/Japan/South Korea. 103 min. Rated: PG-13.
With: Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong-Gun, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse, Liu Yeh & Chen Hong.

The Promise supposedly takes place “when the world was young,” but that, to director Chen Kaige, means something out of Final Fantasy. What convinced the festival favorite and internationally-acclaimed director to take up the wuxia genre (romantic drama combined with martial arts) is a mystery, but his newest film does not give a hoot about looking like a video game. With unintentionally campy undertones, it ends up rivaling Shaolin Soccer.

The plot hinges on a predictable love triangle involving a princess with the beauty that can intoxicate an entire war-torn kingdom. Unfortunately for the men, Princess Qingcheng (Cecilia Cheung) has made a little promise with the powerful Goddess Manshen (Chen Hong) when she was just a dirty little orphan scavenging for food: in return for all the beauty and the riches of the world, Qingcheng will be doomed to lose every man she falls in love with – a promise that cannot be broken unless the course of time reverses.

The first unfortunate man to act out of lust is the villainous Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse), the Duke of the North, who sets out to kidnap the princess by invading the Imperial City where its King, the latest husband of the princess, resides. When the mighty warlord General Guangming (a delightfully comic and narcissistic Hiroyuki Sanada) hears of the Duke’s treachery against the king, he sets out to rescue the ruler with Kunlun (Jang Dong-Gun), a seemingly diffident and gentle slave who turns out to possess a superhuman power to run like the wind, or at least visually, like Sonic the Hedgehog.

While the general and Kunlun set out for the Imperial City, Snow Wolf (Liu Ye), a ninja-like assassin hired by the Duke of the North, attacks the general. Gravely hurt, he has no choice but to command Kunlun to don his famous crimson armor and save the king and the princess on his behalf. The dutiful slave does as he was told, arriving in the Imperial City in disguise and promptly saving the damsel in distress. But in a House of Flying Daggers-case of mistaken identity, Kunlun and the princess fall in love – only she thinks Kunlun is in fact, the great General Guangming.

With literally every scene painstakingly choreographed and drenched in luscious colors and textures, The Promise is enjoyable for all the wrong reasons. It’s simply too difficult to concentrate on the amorous conundrum when every minute someone is somersaulting or floating midair in a feather boa. Despite the layer upon layer of froufrou, the actors, who are mostly a collection of Asian pop culture’s prettiest variety, do a respectable job at projecting the melodrama with believable gusto.

With the general looking like a Power Rangers villain and the pretty-boy villain Wuhuan running around with a golden rod topped with a pointed finger, it’s hard to see how The Promise can be anything but camp. Though the quiet, contemplative nature of recent wuxia imports such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero may have had audiences believing otherwise, wuxia’s most basic intent is to startle the eye with improbable fight sequences and visuals that defy logic. In that sense, The Promise has the beauty of epic proportions that thankfully proves the biggest budget in Chinese film history didn’t go entirely to waste. Marie Iida
May 5, 2006