The Promise (2005)
Promise (2005) 5/10
Chen Kaige’s clunky and ridiculously over the top megaflop The Promise is one of those rare movies that is so obviously and risibly bad that it might actually be good.
I was actually quite shocked that Chen Kaige directed this crap. Was this the same person who directed Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin ? Did Wong Jing somehow shadow direct this, since it has all of Wong Jing’s hijinks and kitsch? I half suspect that Chen Kaige was on crack when he directed this. Or mabye, this was exactly what he wanted, a satire on big budget mega-epics by satrising the whole film. Whatever the intent, The Promise cannot by any measure be considered a good film. All the overwhelming bad press about the film is justified, and i don’t even know where to begin.
The script is an inscrutable mess, about some metaphysical thing called Wu Ji, or “The Promise”, whatever that means. No attempt is made to explain it, so the audience has to take it as it is. Put in a main protaganist(Jang Dong Kun) who runs like Flash Gordon, and Nicolas Tse as a vengeful dude with the most ridiculous looking finger-wand and you get a sense of how fucking unrealistic the whole thing is. The costumes, especially the red crimson armor looks awfully tacky, although the use of colors is one of the motiffs of the film. Dialogue is often cliched, and character development is non-existant. In fact, you could even market The Promise as a comedy, see that so many of the scenes are so ridiculous as to be laughable instead of attaining any dramatic weight.
The camp factor is so high that most of the actors don’t even bother to act credibly and for most parts go over the top. Jang Dong Kun as the slave puts his best Forest Gump impression, while Hiroyuki Sanada hams it up as the prideful general. Nicolas Tse looks positively like a doofus welding the dumbest looking prop in the film, while Cecelia Cheung does her bestest damsel in distress act. By the halfway mark, where Jang actually runs backwards in time, if you still haven’t stopped watching or laughed till you drop, it means that you have probably embraced the campiness of the whole film.
This is one film where it IS necessary to leave your logic and brain behind before watching. Otherwise it will be a most agonising expericence. The CGI is so-so. Some scenes looks positively mesmerising, whilst in other scenes, the CGI fails to meet the mark. Visually, the film is a feast, and amidst the crappy everything, there are little scenes of beauty such that you wonder if it is the work of a schizophrenic cinematographer, intermixing visual brilliance at one scene with crass nonsense. Emotionally, most audiences cease to care by the halfway mark, that is if they don’t laugh themselves to death. The action isn’t all that bad either, or maybe its because my standards have dropped after watching Jackie Chan’s The Myth.
Ultimately, while every single indicator reveals that The Promise is a stinker through and through, i somehow enjoyed this fluff well enough not to condemn it completely. It’s a totally over the top and absolutely trashy pieced of film making that ironically endures because of how godawful it is. Ed Wood would have been proud.
