MOVIES: The Promise (Chen Kaige, 2005)

With a reported budget of $35 million, this is the most expensive movie in Chinese history. It's another in the recent series of lush, epic martial arts fantasies -- think Hero or House of Flying Daggers -- but this one unfortunately emphasizes the weaknesses of the genre.

The stories in these movies always demand major suspension of disbelief, but at their best, they are so emotionally involving and thrilling to look at that we're swept past all of the implausibilities without noticing them too much. But this time, the emotional depth just isn't there, and the story is even goofier than usual.

We start with a little girl wandering through a battlefield, now strewn with corpses, and stealing what food she can find from the dead; she is visited by the Goddess Manshen, who gives her a great gift and a great curse: She will be the greatest beauty in the world and want for nothing material, but any man she ever truly loves, she will lose.

Leap forward twenty years, and that little girl is now a royal concubine, the Princess Qingcheng. And this is where the story starts flying out of control. There's a general and his slave, both of whom love Qingcheng; there's the evil Duke Wuluan and his assassin, Snow Wolf; and there's a messy backstory about the slave and the assassin both coming from the Land of Snow, a land that had been destroyed by Wuluan. Alliances are constantly shifting among these characters, with Qingcheng being unable to make up her mind whether she loves the general or the slave.

As Land-of-Snow-villians, the slave and the assassin are both blessed with superhuman speed. The thing is, the effect of super speed is nearly impossible to pull off in a live-action movie; it always looks cartoony and foolish. Given that the CGI effects in The Promise are on the cheap side to begin with (there's a stampeding herd of bulls early on that is especially poorly done), the fast running inevitably pulls you out of the story.

On the plus side, Peter Pau's photography is lovely, as are Tim Yip's costumes. And if you're visually oriented, those things may be enough for you to enjoy the movie. But on the whole, you'd be better off renting House of Flying Daggers.