OxfordPress.com

Grade: A-

Verdict: This ravishing martial-arts romance is more than a cut above.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

In the absence of an end-of-the-year "The Lord of the Rings" movie, we've been blessed instead with Zhang Yimou's spectacular "House of Flying Daggers," a soaring martial-arts romance that floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee and bends it like Beckham.

Less formally conceived than Zhang's surprise summer hit, "Hero," and painted in a muted autumnal palette instead of the earlier film's bold primary colors, "Daggers" is an intoxicating cocktail of splendid visuals, spectacular action, state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery and some old-fashioned swashbuckling worthy of Hollywood's Golden Age. Only here, swords don't just clash; they fly and spin, twirl and slice in such a stupendous fashion you can almost forgive the film's say-it-ain't-so third-act melodramatics that would be more appropriate to the florid excesses of "The Phantom of the Opera."

In the final days of the Tang Dynasty, circa 859, a number of rebel armies have formed to resist the decaying and corrupt power structure. The largest and most important is the House of the Flying Daggers, a Robin Hood-ish group that takes from the rich and gives to the poor.

Two local deputies, Captain Leo (Andy Lau) and his handsome subordinate Captain Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), have been ordered to locate the rebels' hideout. The best (well, only) lead is a new dancer, Mei (Zhang Ziyi) at the local brothel, the Peony Pavilion. The rumor is she's the blind daughter of the Flying Daggers' former leader.

In a classic bit of good cop-bad cop subterfuge, Leo puts Mei in prison, and Jin, pretending to be a fugitive who wants to join the insurgents, helps her escape. She, in turn, will lead him to their secret lair.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Not only do Jin and Mei reluctantly fall in love, but a number of plot twists ensue in which we learn nothing (and nobody) is as it seems.

As he's proved in movies such as "Raise the Red Lantern," "Red Sorghum" and, most recently, "Hero," Zhang is a master of cinematic raptures. From an astonishing battle in an emerald bamboo forest, where even the mist seems tinted green, to a fierce final duel that goes on so long the russet and golds of late autumn give way to the white-on-white blankness of an early winter storm, "House of Flying Daggers" dazzles you with one show-stopper after another. In the movie's most did-I-really-see-that? scene, Mei plays the Echo Game with Leo -- a kind of medieval Twister in which he tosses a bean at a circle of drums and she must echo its sound by tapping the same drum with her long sleeves.

Familiar as the tomboy princess in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Zhang is something of a special effect herself. A porcelain angel with a dash of bright red on her forehead, she's as ravishing in her way as the swaying bamboo stalks or the tender early-fall forest into which she and Jin plunge, with the emperor's murderous soldiers in hot pursuit.

Even with its final-third flub, "House of Flying Daggers" is a breathtaking excursion into landscapes of the mind and eye you've never imagined.