If this movie had Callisto in it, it could have been the coolest episode of Xena: Warrior Princess ever!

In an effort to keep my reviews pure, unswayed, and free of any legitimate content, I never read any other critic's take on a film until after I have written my review. That said, I can't wait to finish this bad boy so that I can gain some enlightenment as to what the "but the cinematography was breathtaking" film-snob set thinks is so great about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Wait wait, let's backpedal. I'm not saying that I didn't like this movie. I'm not saying that at all. I thought this movie was all well and good. The thing is, I also think Godzilla movies and old, dubbed Jackie Chan movies are all well and good.

Pardon my continuing ignorance in the face of motion pictures, but seriously, why is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon one of the year's must sees (the Universal City crowd that I saw it with stood up and clapped at the end), and a showing of something like The Legend of Dojo Dan and the Kung-Fu Freakout Squad is on TBS on a Sunday afternoon, nobody will even pause long enough to laugh at it as they flip the channels.

With all of the classic elements, from the biologically impossible fight sequences, to the "You killed my master, now we must FIGHT!" storyline, I really don't understand how this movie somehow crosses over from "a movie on TV that I was too hung-over to turn off" to "cinema at its best."

What gives? Is it because it has subtitles that people think it's artsy and brilliant? What if it had been dubbed instead? Would it have gotten the same cold critical treatment as Rumble in the Bronx? And what if Rumble in the Bronx had been subtitled? Would it be "a monument to cinematic excellence"? I'm so confused.

Because the trailer for this movie wasn't on stuff like Dude, Where's My Car?, I admit, I knew nothing about it when I went to go see it at my girlfriend's request. Well, that's not exactly true. I had asked her if there were any giant robots in it. She reluctantly told me that there weren't, but she promised that there would be a lot of really kick-ass fighting sequences. Okay, cool. I'm in.

Somehow she forgot to mention that this movie was going to be subtitled until the lights were dimming in the theatre. I'm such a pud. I fall for this every time. It's just like that time that I got tricked into seeing Life is Beautiful when she told me we were going to see Bride of Chucky. We were a good half hour into the movie before I realized that it wasn't just a really long, annoying trailer.

If I was going to have to read subtitles, I wish it could have at least been translated from Chinese by somebody who didn't really know English. Like fortune cookies or stereo instructions. I would have been much happier with subtitles if they read like:

"My sword is made for dancing and health-care! Very soon and in pleasant company!"
"Please do not jump strongly, that may bring troubles to the other person!"
"Be sure to strike honorably, or the damage can not be guaranteed."

Anyway, since I never saw a trailer or heard a synopsis of this movie, I don't really know what's supposed to be a spoiler and what's not. Reader be warned, I might be giving away important plot points. Of course, considering that I understand as much about this movie as I do about South American Air Traffic Control Protocol, anything that I say is probably just wrong anyway.

The movie starts off with Chow Yun-Fat giving this sword to that chick who kicked all that ass in Tomorrow Never Dies. They talk for a while about how great the sword is, presumably in an effort to get the audience all excited about it, since it doesn't do anything cool like glow or sing or explode.

He-Man made a big deal about his sword too, but at least his was an important part of the whole "by the power of Grayskull" transformation thing. And don't even get me started on Lion-O and the Sword of Omens. But Fatty's sword? Nope. No cool features. It can't even pop open and slice up a vampire's hand like the one in Blade.

All it can do is be the center of dialogue like "But it is not sweet to behold when the green of its blade is covered in the red blood of my fallen enemies." If I was this sword, I'd be pretty pissed that I was 400 years old and legendary, but my coolest feature was bad haiku inspiration.

Enough about that, let's get to the fighting. I still don't quite believe anything I saw tonight. I had just settled down for a long evening of reading "You have much discipline, but your skills are that of a constipated silkworm"-type spiritual and enlightening foreign film making, and then all of the sudden there's a fight sequence so ludicrously over the top that it makes Fight Club look like Good Burger.

No wonder this supposedly awesome sword doesn't shoot fire or transform into a Porsche. The entire budget of this movie obviously went into crane rental and digital wire removal. I mean, there were parts in Charlie's Angels where you went "Uh-huh. I'm sooo sure Drew Barrymore can jump like that. Whatever," but in Dragon it was like "Dude, she just jumped seventeen stories straight up, waist first!"

The characters in this movie could literally fly. And it didn't play like a kind of ethereal "I have learned my lessons well, I am at one with the wind" kind of thing so much as a "I'm tethered to a sixty-foot boom, and when they swing it I just try my best not to smash into the walls too hard" kind of thing.

I mean, it was one thing to have stuff like Tom Cruise flying from a head-on motorcycle collision into aerial fisticuffs in Mission Impossible: 2. That movie made no claims to cinematic brilliance. It was just insane for the sake of insanity. Conversely, to put these kind of hard core Cleopatra 2525 style effects into what was otherwise a serious, artsy type movie was like having Braveheart conclude with Mel Gibson turning into a really bitchin' bird with rockets for wings and blasting off into outer space with a cloud of rainbow colored smoke and gingerbread men. It's cool, but it just don't jive.

Even though I didn't understand it, I liked it. I liked it a lot. In fact, I think it should be mandated from this point forward that any period piece, Chinese or not, should be required to have an acrobatic street brawl every twenty minutes.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has a little something for everybody. While your girlfriend is going "Aww, he really loves her, but he's bound by his warrior code of honor to never tell her," you can go "All right, only three more minutes until that one chick is totally kicking the other chick's ass all over town like a little Asian beach ball! Foreign films ROCK!"

So she jumps off the cliff at the end. Did you not see that coming from the second that the What-Johnny-Depp-Would-Look-Like-Asian guy told her the story of the boy who made a wish and jumped off the mountain?

I don't know. Maybe I just expect every story that somebody tells in a movie to somehow become important later, but as soon as he finished telling the story I was like "Okay then, one or both of these two is taking a header off the top of Mount Wasabi before the credits roll."

Incidentally, when she jumped off of the mountain, did she forget that SHE CAN FLY?! I don't know why she can fly, but she can. She does it through the whole picture.

I'm so confused. I'm gonna go and watch Twin Dragons to get back some sense of reality.