"Jet Li's Fearless"

This martial-arts epic is one of the most beautifully made pictures of the year.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Jet Li

Sept. 22, 2006 | One of the great disadvantages of living in a time when there are so many movies jockeying for our attention, both inside the multiplex and out of it, is that we're often too cavalier about grouping movies into categories: There are things we really want to see, things we might see if our friends express an interest, and things that we'd never dream of bothering with. Fans of martial-arts star Jet Li, and of martial-arts movies in general, have long been looking forward to "Jet Li's Fearless," which has been touted as Li's final martial-arts picture, although that finality is debatable: "Fearless" may be only his last martial-arts epic, which certainly leaves a lot of windows open. Still, there's something grand and enveloping about "Fearless," a fable based loosely on the life of Huo Yuanjia -- played by Li -- a turn-of-the-century fighter who founded the Jingwu Sports Federation, a martial-arts school that focused as much on spiritual self-awareness as on pure technique. If "Fearless" doesn't represent the end of Li's martial-arts career, its vision -- one that manages to be both humble and lavish -- is certainly grand enough to mark a turning point.

But "Fearless" deserves an audience larger than the one that already plans to seek it out. Sold as a martial-arts film, it's also the sort of movie that deserves to draw the kind of moviegoers who came out to gaze with wonder at "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "House of Flying Daggers" -- pictures that were geared not just to genre enthusiasts but were also sold, for better or worse, as "serious" movies suitable for a discriminating mainstream audience.

"Fearless," directed by Ronny Yu, is certainly a genre picture, with all the energy and life the adjective genre implies (it's never a pejorative in my book). "Fearless" is also one of the most beautifully made pictures of the year: The story is told so simply and clearly, and in such striking visual terms, that I can already hear people carelessly accusing it of being clichéd -- although sometimes the things we so comfortably identify as clichés are also the very things that give us our purest movie experiences, allowing movies to reach us in the deepest and most essential way. And Li's performance -- both in terms of its physicality and its emotional pitch -- puts much of what's lauded as great contemporary movie acting to shame. He's a marvel, and his performance feels like a gift from above particularly given that "Fearless" is being released in the same week as that over-earnest Oscar-baiting dud "All the King's Men," where we see Sean Penn acting up a storm of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

"Fearless" is a direct and uncomplicated picture: It opens with Li's Huo facing a series of opponents during a public match. These fighters come from several nations -- England, Spain -- but it's clear that the purpose of the battles, in Huo's eyes, is not just to defend the honor of his country, but to reinforce the honor of the fight itself. He takes on each successive opponent with the calmness of a tree whose leaves are ready to withstand a breeze or a gale: Going sword-to-sword or hand-to-hand, he dips and twirls through the air as if he were part of it, and not a flesh-and-blood creature whose mere existence blocks its flow. Li's fighting is so deeply pleasurable to watch that even its brutality -- and sometimes it is brutal -- can seem like music. Relatively gentle skin-to-skin contact can come off as searing. And sometimes you can almost hear the sound of bones not cracking but bending -- a gentler but more horrifying sound.

Next page: The lingering image of Li's face