MasterChugs Theater: ‘Red Cliff’

John Woo has set himself a new challenge in Red Cliff, and that’s to be as old-fashioned as possible. Returning to his roots after a stint in Hollywood, Woo has made the most expensive film in mainland Chinese history, a pleasantly traditional picture that marks a new direction for one of the world’s premier action maestros.

Woo’s classic Hong Kong films with tough-guy titles like Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled featured intense, focused, almost balletic contemporary gangster shootouts that seemed to redefine what these kinds of movies could do.

Though it stars Woo regular Tony Leung, Red Cliff, by contrast, is a both throwback and change of pace, a massive historical epic that used four writers, three editors, two directors of photography, 300 horses and a cast and crew that came close to 2,000. And oh, how it is epic.

Loosely based on the 14th-century Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” which recounts events in the waning Han dynasty more than a millennium earlier, the film has one of the most familiar of war movie or western setups: the outnumbered good guys scheming to defeat a vastly larger force. In this case, though, the good guys, a pair of small southern China kingdoms whose forces are led by the viceroy Zhou Yu, number in the tens of thousands, and the bad guys, the Han army led by the megalomaniacal general Cao Cao, in the hundreds of thousands. Cao Cao wants to nip these potential insurgencies in the bud, but though the southern leaders soon combine their forces, he professes to be unconcerned.

“A loser joins forces with a coward,” he snarls, “What can they accomplish?”

Needless to say, he is about to find out.

Woo has always had a knack with action, and this movie is no exception: The hand-to-hand combat that takes up a good portion of the film is exciting and well-executed. Perhaps even more impressively, Mr. Woo takes the time to show how the battle plans of Zhou and Zhuge come together. There is an emphasis on strategy that you don’t often see in the sword-and-sandal-epic genre; the most entertaining sequence might come at sea without a single blow traded as Zhuge captures 100,000 of his enemies’ arrows

One thing that hasn’t changed since 1992 is the reassuring presence of the aforementioned Leung, one of the world’s last true matinee idols. His combination of Zen-like calm and wild expressiveness, centered in his pixieish eyes, serves equally well whether he is playing the tortured aesthete for Wong Kar-wai, the murderous bureaucrat for Ang Lee or the action hero for Mr. Woo. Not even body armor and an ancient helmet, let alone a cast of thousands, can contain him.

The computer-generated imagery that makes so much of the movie possible is served up in heaping, state-of-the-art helpings, and the results occasionally slip into the cartoonish. At the same time, Red Cliff is a classic tale that gets a classicist’s treatment. And it’s a triumphant return for the grand old man who, once upon a time in Hong Kong, made A Better Tomorrow, but can still show the fantasy/action boys how it’s done.