Li is Hero in Chinese pop film

HERO: In a series of flashbacks, a nameless warrior recounts how he defeated three assassins determined to murder a king bent on uniting warring states in China. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Now playing at Coolidge Corner Theater.

After becoming one of the most successful releases in China, Zhang Yimou's Hero finally finds an audience in America. A sweeping epic of love, death, and betrayal in pre-unified China, Hero has all the elements you would expect from a martial arts film, yet it never seems rehashed, recycled, or predicable.

As warriors glide through the air, flaunting physics and expectation, it becomes obvious that Hero is something new, and as evidenced by its popularity and hold on the American box office these past two weeks, it seems destined to reside in the pages of Asian pop-cinema lore.

Set in China in the third century BC, when seven different kingdoms battled for rights to rule, Hero is the story of Nameless (Jet Li), a prefect and warrior dispatched from the kingdom of Qin to eliminate three assassins who have sworn to kill a king (Daoming Chen) determined to unify the states.

Nameless, who is part Clint Eastwood, part Tishiro Mifune, recounts his battles with Sky (Donnie Yen), Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), moving closer to the king after each story. To prove his exploits, Nameless displays the weapons of his fallen enemies.

Nameless first relates how he defeated Sky in a rain-slicked temple, and then how he used rumors of a romantic relationship between Snow and Broken Sword to play them against each other to his own benefit. Yet the king, who has not removed his armor in years for fear of constant attack, listens with disbelief before revising and eventually offering his own interpretation of what happened.

Essentially, Hero is a story being told and retold, but it is done in such a way that you can't ever be sure what is real and what is fiction. Martial arts film geek and guru, Quentin Tarantino, is credited as executive producer, but his influence is less felt than that of Akira Kurosawa. From Rashomon comes Hero's flashback/revision narrative structure, and the film's sweeping battle scenes, countless extras, and vivid colors recall the late director's Ran.

Yet very much like Tarantino, Zhang and his screenwriters Li Feng and Wang Bin never let the action eclipse the human stories of love and sacrifice that are really at the heart of the film these elements of relationship contribute to larger themes of self-empowerment and nation building.

For everything that Hero accomplishes as a whole, it is still a seamless combination of individual elements, from the ballet-like fight choreography to the sobering score by Tan Dun. In epic fashion, battles play out on both small and large scale, from the achingly beautiful fight between Snow and Broken Sword's apprentice in a forest awash with golden leaves to the hail of arrows that descend on a calligraphy school.

Calligraphy, Broken Sword tells Nameless, demands the same precision and focus required of swordplay, the same concentration and steadiness of mind and hand. These are the same skills, one imagines, which went into making Hero.