House of Flying Daggers

Perhaps too reminiscent of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, which came only four years before HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and perhaps trying to hard to be profound in its close, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS is nevertheless an extremely entertaining martial-arts film that is not just about martial arts. As fun as it is to watch Jet Li and Jackie Chan flip about, those films are too one-note, too orchestrated. HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS is surprising, lurid, violent, and devious. The plot is complicated: a blind girl who was working as a dancer at a brothel attempts to assassinate the captain of the corrupt Chinese dynasty. She is defeated by him, however, and ends up in jail, where she is rescued by a man who may or may not be on her side. The film likes to take us down many different paths that it suddenly refuses to finish by showing that what we have just seen wasn't how things were. There is romance, and there are scenes of devious trickery involving fake deaths and betrayal. These are all put around intermittent battle sequences that are reminiscent of the playfulness of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, but rooted in more reality than that film. It would have been easy to create a stupid plot around this film, for the action sequences and the film's art production is what is most attractive, but the filmmakers created a complicated plot around what can be viewed as simply-executed action sequences. Meaning, CGI is easy to create if you know what you're doing with it, but deciding to create an exciting plot around exciting scenes is something rare. HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS is quite a good film.
House of Flying Daggers: ★★★1/2