By: Eliot John Hagen (April 23, 2005)

Zhang Yimou has done it again; he has made another genuinely beautiful movie. The actors are beautiful, the music is beautiful, the story is beautiful, the action is beautiful, the costumes are beautiful; it’s simply a gorgeous film.

But don’t get me wrong; "Flying Daggers" isn’t all shine and no substance; the plot is (for once) unpredictable. There are twists and turns that you’d never see coming (Western films failed in that aspect) and all of it was planned out with such care.

Ziyi Zhang plays Mei, a blind dancer who is believed to have ties with the secret and subversive organization known as the House of Flying Daggers. Captain Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is ordered to find the new leader of the group, so he tries to win Mei over and get her to lead him to the Flying Daggers’ hideout.

Zhang Yimou is a brilliant martial-arts director; he uses a bit of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" type physics for his fight scenes, but he doesn’t overdo it. Instead of using them for action, (although they don’t lag there) he uses them for beauty and majesty.

The plot is so intriguing yet so full of human emotion that you can’t help but cry at the end. (I’m tearing now, actually, just from thinking about it.) The entire cast feel like real people; they aren’t super humans with no emotion (like in those gory Bruce Lee and Jet Li movies), but living characters in the stunningly beautiful painting that is "House of Flying Daggers."