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Critics Consensus: The Assassin's thrilling visuals mark a fresh highlight for director Hsiao-hsien Hou, even if its glacial pace may keep some viewers at arm's length.
Critic Consensus: The Assassin's thrilling visuals mark a fresh highlight for director Hsiao-hsien Hou, even if its glacial pace may keep some viewers at arm's length.
All Critics (117) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (94) | Rotten (23) | DVD (1)
"The Assassin" is gorgeous to look at, but not all that compelling to watch.
It's so lovely, from the brocade draped interiors to the mist moving over a landscape in the half light, like a series of confounding paintings placed end to end.
The visuals relegate the acting to secondary importance. They overwhelm the story. And they make "The Assassin" unforgettable.
Part of the problem is Hou's style works at odds with the material.
The Assassin is like some stereotypical beauty - gorgeous, but frustratingly incapable of prolonged conversation.
It's so elliptical in its approach that there's no love for anyone, or anything, outside of beauty. It can be admired - greatly, even - but it can't be felt.
The Assassin" is a gorgeous film, artfully structured, that bares however, little semblance to the wuxia genre, apart from the era it takes place.
Much like Wong with The Grandmaster, Hou has made a martial arts film that is more of a personal statement than a genre piece, but his style suits the genre surprisingly well and certainly makes its mark in martial arts cinema.
You're not likely to see a better film this year.
The pictorial beauty of this scene is self-evident; it's in Hou's painstaking orchestration of each component part and the thematic weight imparted by their careful configuration that lends the film a steadily increasing romantic gravitas.
I say this all to say that folks have been fallen all over themselves for the Chinese drama, THE ASSASSIN, which is indeed a solid film but nothing I haven't see before
I was NOT prepared for was just how beautiful the visuals Hou [Hsia-Hsein] gives us would be - beautiful to the point that I ultimately didn't care at all whether I understood what The Assassin was trying to say.
A stunning film with gorgeous visuals and a splendid sound design, but also way too measured and cryptic in its narrative, edited in a way that makes it feel like a frustrating puzzle that lacks important information and doesn't justify any effort to try to understand it.
Super Reviewer
Yes the plot is mostly indecipherable but at a certain point you stop caring as I don't believe your supposed to be all that invested in the story. What matters are the visual and auditory elements . . . the gorgeous cinematography, the panoramic backgrounds, and the way the sounds of nature seem to hijack every scene.
Although the cinematography is lush and the locations grandiose, THE ASSASSIN establishes a steady pace that prefers stillness over action as well as a storytelling method that executes through staccato bursts amidst a domineering and overarching insistence on patience. Both the performances and fight scenes are muted yet beautiful to observe, but the film ultimately results in well-crafted parts that make up a frustrating whole in which the end feeling is empty rather than profound and a whimper rather than a bang. Simply, it is visually stimulating but emotionally flat.
'The Assassin' is not your typical 'Wuxia' martial arts epic, it is however an incredibly intelligent and beautifully shot film that relies more on audience perception than the existential expositions and purely on the characters at play. Then after seeing this once I felt I really needed to see it again, not just for it's luscious and outstanding cinematography, but for what's the hidden message so caught up in the drama and conflict at play within its historical setting. Aside from having both inner and surface quality, while it's slow moving at times, the action and fighting is pretty awesome. I urge viewers to come to this film with an open mind and not have expectations for a non-stop all out action flick, for one it out-ranks the most underwhelming or cheesiest Wuxia martial arts epics and would most certainly make viewers think a lot more about what they observe from a film such as this.
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