It showed to me that Yimou learned a lot making Hero. Flying Daggers is a much more accomplished action film, with the fight scenes much more imaginative and better-integrated into the story. It's every bit as beautiful as Hero, but the beauty here is more in service to the story than was the case in the earlier film.
Zhang Zhi-Yi comes into her own in this film. Her entrance is a grand one, and her presence throughout is powerful -- as indeed are all the performances in this film. One can only wish they had been backed up with a worthy story.
Because, as in Hero, Yimou sacrifices story-telling for delicate beauty, and the end result is unsatisfying. The story is unbalanced -- as a set of key revelations late in the film undo much of the emotional investment of the audience. The story never really recovers from this reversal, and just sort of limps to a climax you can see coming a mile away.
Yimou also lingers too much on gorgeous scenery and thus fails to deliver the impact his story asks for. You'll feel like giggling as the melodrama reaches its peak, largely because Yimou has given you too much time to think about what's happening; a problem earlier directors of wuxia films avoided by piling on the narrative thick and heavy so that the audience was too busy trying to keep up with the plot to consider the silliness of what was going on. Here, the silliness is given far too much room to make itself known to the audience, and the film loses much of its punch because of it.
That said, the fight scenes are great fun, particularly one that starts innocuously enough in a field of golden flowers. Yimou's picked up a much better rhythm of cutting his fight sequences, and the sound work in this film is so spectacular you could practically watch these scenes blindfolded. Not that you would want to.
It is said that Yimou wrote the original version of this film with Anita Mui in mind for a key role, and after Mui's untimely death, rewrote the film to remove her character rather than recast the film. It's possible the film lost a great deal in this rewrite, and it's intriguing to consider what the film might have been had Mui's energy and wit been added to the mix. A final credit dedicates the film to her memory.
Ultimately -- it's worth seeing. It's better than either Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and I think one might say it comes closer to fulfilling the promise of big money applied to wuxia than either of those films. That is, while it's as lush and Hollywood-looking a production as the earlier pictures, it does a much better job of providing the sorts of action thrills wuxia films of the 80's and 90's provided. It promises good things for the future -- if Yimou can just get himself to embrace the idea of overloaded storylines. He still tries to do too much with too little. One of the keys to this kind of storytelling is to create frenetic stories that gallop straight for the finish at full speed without giving the audience time to catch their breath. Yimou gets so enamoured of his beautiful images that he slows his films down -- and in wuxia, if you aren't moving at top speed, you can't stay on the slender bamboo branch for long
