An Empress and the Warriors (2008)

The greatest movie ever!

A Masterpiece!

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

This is not a great martial arts movie, it is a good story, well acted and directed with something for everyone. It is like a cross between 'House of Flying Daggers' and the Chinese warrior epics you may have seen. All the lead characters are believable, there is a good and evil story, a love story, a friendship story and an unrequited love story, oh and plenty of action. The fights are well choreographed, especially the larger battles with some scenes that look truly realistic, I don't know how they did some of them with no deaths ( makes the chariot scenes in Ben Hur look like Childs play ) I did get a bit bored with some of the lovely dovey stuff, but by the end of the film I knew I would watch this again. The end fight is worth waiting for, not just for the action but for the emotion shown by the actors.

When the Emperor is wounded in battle he turns the running of the army to one of his generals(Donnie Yen), a man of absolute loyalty but uncertain birth. This doesn't sit well with the Emperor's nephew who kills the old man when he gets a chance. What the nephew doesn't know is that, Donnie Yen was also made heir to the throne. The generals and the nephew don't like this and Yen wanting to part of the politics makes the daughter of the emperor Empress. She takes the throne, vowing to go through the military training and lead her army. Of course the nephew doesn't like that idea either and he begins to plot to take control of the kingdom by force.A romantic action film with a triangle at its center (the empress is rescued by an inventor in the woods who doesn't know who she is, and doesn't let on he's a great fighter. That pair falls in love while Donnie yen looks on longingly), this has some great fight sequences but suffers from a romance thats essentially a Cliff Notes version of emotion. The spectacle is here but the emotion really isn't and what you get out of this film will depend upon what you bring to it. To me for the romance to work you have to be willing to fill in all of the blanks the film leaves unsaid. I couldn't do it and just sort of waived my hand at the thought of much of the plot. Actually this is not a bad film, but its not a particularly remarkable one. Its very much like several recent martial arts films, Three Kingdoms springs first to mind, where the action sequences overwhelm the slender plot. Its one of what seems to be a trend where directors seem to think they can be brief with the plot so long as they are showy with the spectacle (The Promise anyone?). Forgive me I need a plot to drive the action.Worth a look if you run across it say as a rental, but I would be hard pressed to really justify a 12 buck viewing in theaters. (This is going to be the first film screened as part of this years New York Asian Film festival which strikes me as rather an odd choice since its strangely unremarkable film to be part of a film festival. The film is neither the best nor the worst of its type, its just something thats unremarkable part of the middle of the pack)

Tagline: A dismal effort from the action director of Hero… Review by Neo: It is probably normal that DVD or movie posters nowadays rhyme more with the word misleading than a true reflection. Looking at the poster of Ching Siu Tung's latest war epic, An Empress and the Warriors, there are three warriors in armors, namely the as usual Donnie Yen, the ever stoic Leon Lai and the elegantly beautiful Kelly Chen. One must start wondering if it is the believability factor of having Kelly Chen as a warrior empress is a prominent fraud. While it is probably a fraud in terms of making the paying audience to sit through a woman with obvious modern looks in ancient warrior, the real fraud is seeing Leon Lai in armor. Since when did Leon put on that armor, when he wore peasant clothing throughout the flick. Moving on from the marketing fraud theory, the question moves to whether or not this flick serves up enough meat and wine to satisfy the current reviewer. The answer is a quick no and if you must ask for his bluntly honest opinion, Neo wants to fire the casting agency and probably have the screenwriter set on fire as well.The winner of the first issue or problem is the casting of Kelly Chen. Everyone knows Kelly is one with limited acting range and while she is elegantly pretty enough to engage Neo's attention, her acting at important moments are largely laughable. The manner she screams for glory, anger or help are almost to the point of hitting and stretching the laughing buttons of every normal human being. In fact at this moment, Neo just cannot take his mind away from the moment she screams in pain near the end of the film. Frankly, Chen fails to emote with the audience and her acting is plain crap. While Kelly may be able to play a dead-serious high ranking cop in Johnnie To's Breaking News, she is certainly no warrior with a warm heart.Another reason to sack the casting director is why the hell you would bother to cast three actors with almost equal stoic acting is really beyond Neo. When the best thing to come out of the flicks lies in Leon Lai's somewhat interesting performance, the audience probably knows what they have truly got themselves into. While one wouldn't say the flick is a complete waste of time as it is probably still better than dozens of other HK cinema apprentices. It goes without saying that people expect more with war epics or even movies with ancient costumes to boost.Without being a total critic, Neo is craving for some pros to talk about, but in a switch of conscious, he decided to proceed with the cons. The battle sequences are beyond un-witness-able and one would have through that after the years of action directing and directing epics battle, Ching would know much better. When a movie does not relate or attempt to connect with the audience, it will usually not win the side of the audience. Adding to this mess is the acting skills of Donnie Yen. While Yen have been appearing in almost every HK action-er in the past decade and probably is just as hard working as the more famous Andy Lau, Yen must admit that he will probably never win a Best Actor Award. Whenever a slightly more challenging scene comes along, Yen's face will overacts and the result is the audience laughing on the outside, rather than emoting in silence on the inside. However, this is really no fault to Yen, as he really tries, but rather the burden of lad falls on director Ching for usually such close up shots on Yen and Chen's limited acting face.As mentioned before, Leon Lai is the best out of the pack as of the three; he is most human and perhaps the most pure. Lai is stoic, but he neither overacts nor underplays his character as an all-knowing doctor/ inventor. It is the scenes with Lai and Chen that allows the film to smoothly run to the heist finish line. The view of the tree tops, the lake sequences and the hot air balloon are all good moments of cinematography in picturing the beauty of China. A good performance from Lai and certainly one that is comfortable with his range and self.All in all, An Empress and the Warriors is a far cry of some of Ching's best works (Chinese Ghost Story days and one of Neo's all time favorite – Swordsman 2). If one say that Ching have lost form, that is almost untrue to ponder upon as it won't take long for people to point you towards the direction of the great action sequences of Warlords and even the fun fighting in the Japanese flick ,Dororo. So what exactly went wrong, the question is simple, just blame it all on Steven Seagal (he last directed Belly of the Beast in 2003), but seriously Ching is probably a better action director than a director. So in the mean time, forget the days of Swordsman 2 and think about sometime that is just borderline average HK Cinema and what you get is a laughable Kelly Chen trying to be a warrior, Donnie Yen trying to emote and director Ching forgetting he is not shooting a Seagal production. Then again, at least Leon Lai manages to impress… (Neo 2008)I rate it 5.5/10www.thehkneo.com

Someone will point out the plot has some flaws, yet it doesn't matter for me to enjoy one of the most exciting two hours in my life! The movie is full of bold imagination, amazing depiction of ancient wars and the great actions of superhero. Donnie Yen in the last scene is just the Mars and there have never been a character in the cinematic history as heroic as him! You will be touched to cry when Leon Lai and Kelly Chen ride the fire balloon to watch such a splendid landscape of beautiful China! The scene that Leon Lai is going to fly with his fire balloon and Kelly Chen hurried to catch up with him, with the accompany of the Orphean strains of the theme song, will become one of the most romantic scenes in Chinese cinematic history! Believe me, take your beloved to watch this movie at weekend and you will love each other more!