I Would Have Enjoyed This Far More If...

... 90% of the battle scenes we deleted.

By that I mean the slow motion multi-camera shots of people getting whacked with the shaft or the flat side of a spear and inexplicably dying from the blow.

In one scene, the hero has 3 baddies on his left, 3 baddies on his right (the baddies are just waving their spears around instead of thrusting at our fella) the hero sticks his spear betwixt them and sort of flaps it from side to side, hitting the belligerents in their stomachs with the shaft. To be exact, he hots them on the leather armour covering their stomachs.

They all go flying backwards with unbelievable force and presumably are dead because they don't get up again.

Meanwhile my brain is thinking "For God's sake, this is ridiculous! How would being hit on you stomach armour with the flat of a spear kill you. And actually, 2 other guys on your side are being hit at exactly the same time so the blow you receive is only 1/3 of the hero's full force (and absorbed by your armour).

Admittedly that's a lot to think during such a scene, however I easily managed to finish that train of thought because once I had the scene was still going on because it like many others were shot in jerky slow mo!!

I don't understand how anyone could say the battle scenes were fluid and poetic, they were clunky unbelievable and cliché.

That's a shame because I really enjoyed the choreography, e.g. one guy is going forward into the enemy and he has to grab and utilise different spears as he makes his way forward: he stabs one person, grabs a spear, stabs another, spins and pulls his first spear through the body and stabs person 3. All the fights were set up very well but John Woo feckered them up with his editing.

I loved the 1st film but by about the 10% point of the 2nd I realised this and in the end just fast forwarded the fight scenes.

Other parts of the movie were wonderful such as the two strategists playing their Chinese sit-down guitars and the fire ships for example. (even tho the slow mo fire ships almost ruined it).