Michelle Yeoh is resplendent as the star of Su Chao-pin’s awesome REIGN OF ASSASSINS
REIGN OF ASSASSINS (JIANYU JIANGHU) (Su Chao-pin, 2010)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, July 10, $13, 1:00
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinemanews.com
A hit at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, Reign of Assassins is a tense, exciting, and deeply romantic wuxia film from Taiwanese writer-director Su Chao-pin and Hong Kong codirector John Woo. During the Ming Dynasty, a secret gang of assassins known as the Dark Stone is trying to capture both halves of the remains of the enlightened monk Bodhi, which are thought will bring the owner great power when reunited. But after a bloody attack on a minister’s residence, Drizzle (Kelly Lin) takes off with half of the desiccated skeleton, leaving her cohorts, including Lei Bin (Shawn Yue), the Magician (Leon Dai ), and their leader, the Wheel King (Wang Xueqi), dead set on finding her. But Drizzle, whose sword specialty is the water-shedding technique that can bend her blade around a person’s body before stabbing them, decides to change her life, getting a new face (and new portrayer, the great Michelle Yeoh) and name, Zeng Jing, and moving to a Nanjing village where she sells cloth at an outdoor market and falls for a local courier, Jiang Ah-sheng (Jung Woo-sung). But her past is always close behind, and after she is forced to display her remarkable martial arts skills during a supposed bank robbery — actually an attempt to capture the other half of the monk’s remains, believed to belong to banker Zhang Dajing (You Liping), the Dark Stone, with new member Turquoise (Barbie Hsu), who has a penchant for using her body to get what she wants, head for Nanjing for a final showdown. Heavily influenced by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Su’s Reign of Assassins is more than just a successful genre exercise; his excellent script features well-drawn characters, intriguing back stories, and, at its heart, a beautiful romance. There are plenty of bloody swordfights, courtesy of action director Stephen Tung, and humor supplied by Zeng Jing and Ah-sheng’s matchmaking landlord, Auntie Cai (Paw Hee-ching). The Malaysian-born Yeoh, the glamorous star of such action films as Butterfly and Sword, Once a Cop, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is resplendent as Zeng Jing, lighting up the screen whether flirting with Ah-sheng or battling an army of evildoers. Su does a marvelous job of keeping the narrative strong and tight despite having to deal with a multitude of languages on the set, from Korean and Mandarin to English and Cantonese. The amiable Su, who previously directed the ghost story Silk (2006) and the comedy Better than Sex (2003) and whose next venture is an alien sci-fi film, is being honored at the 2011 New York Asian Film Festival with showings of BTS as well as several movies that he wrote; he will participate in a Q&A following the July 10 screening of the awesome Reign of Assassins.