When a city state comes under siege by a conquering army commanded by a celebrated strategist, they meet their match in the form of a pacifist warrior dispatched by a friendly nation to aid their allies. With Andy Lau as its star and Jacob Cheung, the action director of Hero, at the helm you expect something pretty spectacular from Battle Of Wits, but despite its epic scale and inventive battle sequences it seems more interested in lecturing the viewer on the dubious morality of warfare than anything else. This means that Cheung spends at least as much time and energy on pseudo-intellectual and rather naive waffle as he does playing to his strengths so that even when visual spectacle and action comes to the fore it's not long before it's interrupted for yet another ham-fisted speech to remind us that "killing is bad". It does have its moments but Cheung confuses sentimentality and manipulation for drama and the characters never feel like real people; just ciphers to get his rather clumsy point across. Some may find the battle sequences worth the rather long-winded effort, but Red Cliff did something very similar and did it a lot better.

Better than what I expected; apart from the the understandably not-up-to-Hollywood-blockbusters CGI and the, in my opinion, unnecessary love plot, I felt the story was very solid and stayed true to its central theme.