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Rating: Partial return to the origins for the Chinese director John Woo. After 15 years in Hollywood, during which he tried to bring the hyper-adrenaline stylistic imprint of his cinema to the States, he returns to his homeland and directs the most expensive Chinese epic of all time. “The Battle of Red Cliff”, which arrived in Italian cinemas at the end of October in a reduced version compared to the one for the Asian market, is based on the real events that took place during the Battle of Chibi, in the year 208 AD.
From his American experience, Woo brings back the formal perfection of images he acquired in Hollywood by signing consumer films, yet always unique, such as “Face/Off - Two Faces of an Assassin”, “Mission: Impossible II”, and “Broken Arrow”. From his production in Hong Kong in the '80s, he takes a certain taste for splatter, or at least a bloody representation of clashes, and the inevitable use of slow motion and zooms (which owes a lot to the cinema of Jess Franco).
In the end, he creates a film of very difficult placement in the West and yet fascinating. Once you overcome the initial difficulty in understanding the characters and certain rushed moments despite the two and a half hours of duration (consider that the original lasts 4 hours and 20 minutes), you enter a fascinating world made of violence and rituality, of traditions and ruthless strategists, of melee weapons and refined battle tactics (the “villain” Cao Cao discovers bacteriological warfare with the dispatch of plague-stricken corpses to the shores where the enemy camps).
Old Woo fans will have no trouble recognizing the director's hand from his independent period. Even though it is a colossal, the film bears the marks of the pre-Hollywood Chinese cinema, that of off-masterpieces like “The Killer” or “Hard Boiled”, from which a fetish actor of the Hong Kong period returns: Tony Leung.
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