I had thought House of Flying Daggers (Thập diện mai phục) was bad, but I didn't know The Promise (Vô cực) was worse. And I didn't know The Banquet was even way worse than The Promise.
Beautiful cinematography, no story, and everyone dies in some sort of death triangle or octagon, these are repeating themes in Chinese cinema. Throw a bunch of celebrities in there with a love story and think it can always pass as something good. Not necessarily. It's almost come to a point in which movies like this are really nothing special anymore.
It’s hard to believe the film is a multi-million dollar stuff. The audience can see that The Banquet is a pretty low cost movie which was mainly shot in a huge workshop, and even the film director made it more look like small-budget-drama. For instance, during in the final banquet scene (obviously it is the pivot scene of the movie) there appears only the main characters thoughout the whole 20-30 minutes, which makes the film cheap. Some soldiers appeared when they were called up. But what about all the other participants, which must have been hundreds? Why didn't they react or response to the whole weired events? Even the audience, shouldn’t they have made some noise? However, in the movie, they were totally absent.
It could also be so much better if lengthy scenes with dialogues were left out. I was falling asleep during this movie as it was so much boring and uninspiring. The fights scenes are badly choreographed: more leaping of great heights and silly overlong battles. No! all I want to see is Bruce Lee style fighters, e.g. Fearless (Hoắc Nguyên Giáp) style with no silly impossible flying. It's a pity because the sets and the costumes are amazing. Eventually, most viewers will leave the theater shaking their heads in disappointment due to the ending and all the possibly fine things in the film will be gone. The ending was horrible. It's kind of fad now in East Asian cinema to have endings that can interpreted in several different ways. Whoever made the decision on such an ending should be banned from ever again working on a movie.
Still, the film looks like another Harmlet in Chinese costumes. Maybe, the holes and problems in plot, dialog exist even in Shakespear's orignal work. However, it's ancient China where the story is setup. It should respect a little historical reality. But the dialogs, the behaviors of most characters, the story line is not even close to what ancient China was. It was a very rotten period of time in China, but just not that unrealistic.
The Chinese director paid too much emphasis on the "artistic" slaughter scene, on the "artistic" stick beating scene, showing no respect to humanity, as practiced in the communist China. These things seems too "beautiful" to be deleted. But in fact, they had little connection with the whole story. It’s extremely so unecessarily uncomfortable to see that much blood pouring down.
The problem of the main cast is Zhang (Chương Tử Di), who plays the role with all the bearing of a power-hungry, lovelorn empress but is unable to reflect the necessary charisma of an evil queen. The empress role requires a bigger, more experienced, more capable actress to fill the screen, even though on a purely mechanical level Zhang’s performance is fine.
No doubt, it’s the worst film I saw with some expectation these years.
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