With Red Cliff, John Woo returns with his first film in six years and his first non-English film since the landmark Hard Boiled (1992). Can the man who was once so clearly at the top of the action game with masterpieces like The Killer and A Bullet in the Head find his cultural importance yet again? The film has garnered a sizable amount of buzz on its way overseas, in no small part due to the unusual decision to take a two-part, four-hour experience and cram into one theatrical experience running just under two-and-a-half hours. Imagine taking the two parts of Kill Bill, cutting out nearly half of it, and releasing it as one film. Or taking the three films of Lord of the Rings and reducing it to one. There would still be remarkable set-pieces, but something significant would be lost. In the case of Red Cliff, the resulting experience has some undeniable power but is a storytelling mess. Hard to follow and difficult to care about, it nearly feels like a trick, a technique to get people to watch the full experience when it's eventually released on DVD and Blu-ray. It's not like this version of Red Cliff isn't worthwhile – it’s too technically accomplished and far too beautiful to look at to completely ignore – but I'm hoping to someday see the version that adds the emotional weight to the pretty pictures.

The most expensive Chinese-language film ever made feels thematically akin to the historical martial arts epics that have recently been produced by Zhang Yimou (Hero and House of Flying Daggers) and fans of Yimou's work should definitely take a trip to Red Cliff. This is not only the "biggest" film that Woo has ever made but it has a scope nearly unrivaled in most filmmaker's resumes. The film takes place in A.D. 208 and details a battle for power between warlords. The leader of the Imperial Army, Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), wants to reunite the divided land and destroy the men threatening his rule, Liu Bei (You Yong), Sun Quan (Chang Chen), and Sun's right-hand man Zhou Yu (Tony Leung). Meanwhile, Liu and Sun work together to stop the powerful Cao Cao and his hundreds of thousands of men, with all of the action building to the legendary Battle of Red Cliffs.

Red Cliff is an orgy of battle sequences with some of the most lavishly produced and impressive fight scenes in years. Where other directors may stage a sequence with a few hundred soldiers and a few thousand flaming arrows, Red Cliff brings virtually millions of each to the party. The constant fighting is punctuated by several wartime strategy scenes, but, especially in this truncated version that had to lose character as it lost running time, it's really all about the action. Woo seems to have be having a blast – certainly more than on his last few American stinkers – and it shows in the overabundance of slow motion effects, plumes of blood, and the overall grand scope of the piece.

Having not seen the two-film version of Red Cliff, it's hard to say if the human element of the epic is disappointing because of the truncation or if it's simply out of Woo's grasp as a filmmaker when it comes to this kind of material. Yimou always finds a way to make the people in his historical epics feel real but the characters in Red Cliff not only feel like pawns but practically like special effects. Red Cliff is so over the top with style, score, and special effects that the human element disappears, and I feel like that was probably a small problem in the four-hour version that has been amplified by the two-and-a-half-hour one. I loved watching Red Cliff from a purely technical level but never cared about it on a human one.

Rating: TWO AND A HALF BONES

Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)