But the story is also pretty good, entailing an assassin named Nameless (Jet Li) who meets with a legendary king (Daoming Chen) ostensibly to inform him that he's slain the three assassins (Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, and Donnie Yen) who have previously tried to assassinate him. But the wise king, who has visions of a unified China, gradually deduces Nameless's actual mission, and so the assassin's tale is replayed a number of times, in different color schemes, until the truth is revealed. There's nothing particularly surprising about what the truth turns out to be, and the film's ultimate message about nationalism is not complicated. But the many fight scenes are so gorgeously depicted that the Rashomon elements take a clear back seat, in favor of an elegant visual style that makes the swordplay seem like high-art ballet, with eye-poppin' thrills much closer to the Blue Man Group than Crouching Tiger. The US marketing campaign would lead you to believe this is along the lines of Kill Bill, and the presence of so many major martial arts film stars in a revenge drama would seem to reinforce that. But this is really a film about personal sacrifice and the cold realities of war, with little in the way of evisceration or bloodshed. The effects are good, the fight sequences surprisingly thrilling even though the string-fighting elements were played out even before Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Above all, the visual element is what makes Hero stand apart as something truly great despite so much of it being stuff we've seen many times before. It may simply be martial arts by way of IKEA, but I sure had a good time watching it.
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