It would be great to be a fly on the wall should this movie ever play a Multiplex; the kick would be to watch the auditorium fill up with forty-year-old schoolboys, the target audience of Run Run Shaw and Bruce Lee, and watch them exit en masse around the forty minute mark when they realise what they've let themselves in for and the more thoughtful of them - if that's not a contradiction in terms - wonder if there might be something, given the title, to take to the Trades Description people, for what we have here is something to please specialists in 8th century Chinese History with lavish illustrations. We have an odd melange of exquisite water colours, lavish interiors, long takes and old and middle-aged men looking like contestants in an Inscrutability Chang Contest, the whole punctuated every thirty minutes or so by rapid bouts - none lasting more than twenty seconds - of martial arts against a virtually silent background with what little music almost always emanating from on-screen instruments. I watched it at the pseuds' natural habitat, the National Film Theatre and they did themselves proud; at the end of the film the end credits, all in Chinese characters, are printed against a black background, unintelligible by definition and yet none of the audience moved a muscle for the several minutes it took them to unspool. They could, of course, have been fluent in Chinese to a man; on the other hand ...
Review of The Assassin
