ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Leofwine_draca THE BANQUET is the Chinese martial arts retelling of Shakespeare's HAMLET, a play with which I'm very familiar. The problem here is that THE BANQUET jettisons most of the good stuff leaving a flabby, overlong production that often looks fantastic but has no substance to go with the style. Almost all of the high drama from the original play has been removed and instead we get a familiar tale of court intrigue and a tyrannous emperor.I really wanted to like this film, and the limited martial arts action is quite nice, with some HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS-inspired wirework and even a few gore effects thrown into a mix. It's a shame, then, that the characters are so resolutely one-dimensional and the entire storyline feels dragged out, particularly at the climax (which is hugely anti-climatic, given that the entire film builds towards it).The cast do the best they can with the limited material. Daniel Wu is okay as the Hamlet character, but he's been better elsewhere (like ONE NIGHT IN MONGKOK). Ziyi Zhang is pretty good - and detestable - as the scheming Empress, and the others rarely disappoint; it's just a shame that the story is so lacking and that ambiguous ending just feels silly. Check out the same year's CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER: it's a similar milieu, a similar storyline, and MUCH better.

Anssi Vartiainen I doubt that anyone could claim that this film isn't very pleasing to look at. The cinematography, the art design, the costumes, the battle choreographies, the settings, they're all very nice to look at, breath-takingly stunning even. Add in talented actors (Zhang Ziyi especially will always remain close to my heart) and a beautifully performed score and you have a film that has a very pretty outer exterior.Unfortunately the story and the plot don't quite manage to keep up. The film suffers from an inability to tell a coherent story and to keep its viewers engaged to the plot. Right from the first few scenes we are left wondering just what in the name of gods is going on and where this story is going. Of course some of these questions get eventually answered and knowing that this is based on Hamlet helps a lot, although it should be able to stand on its own merits when it comes to the latter. Naturally, some might argue that one should just pay attention and that some questions don't need answering, but the fact remains that sometimes a whole scene goes by and only later we learn just what happened, if we learn at all. The major example is the last scene, which to me feels completely useless and confusing, as the main conflict has already been resolved and thus the events of the ending scene just leaves us confused and a bit angry, because it means that we never resolve one of the biggest mysteries of the film, although naturally there are hints and nudges, but all of them are inconclusive. That's just bad storytelling if you ask me. Viewers are naturally curious and leaving us hanging like that serves no purpose.Nevertheless, I can't say that I dislike this film. It's gorgeous to look at, the actors are talented and it's only the plot that keeps this movie from being all that good. But, sometimes the pretty exterior is all that one needs to spend a few hours, and for that purpose this movie is more than enough.

grandmastersik If I mention what this film's about you may be intrigued/interested enough to watch it, so I'll pass. I don't like to write reviews here, rather make comments on films when in the mood for doing so. My rating system's simple: if it's so bad I have to turn it off, a 1 is given... only a couple of films I've managed to sit through have received a 1 and that was thoroughly deserved; The Banquet gets a 2 because I'm feeling generous.Moving on though, the two female leads hammed it up unashamed, Daniel Wu was so wooden he may as well have been the mask he wore with a computer-generated voice and his character was so passive and plain crap, it defies belief that it was the central role in this film. Or maybe it's just? Actually, thinking about how bad his character was, perhaps it was the actor's intention to portray him so?Anyway, any film which is confused enough to want to believe it's theatre isn't going to go down well with me and that was my main complaint with this bag of shite. I kept hoping that the crowned prince would give it to a hundred soldiers at the end in order to get through to his uncle, his face thick with blood like a mask of vengeance, but no, this is the same man who held his breath for ten minutes so that everyone else in his theatre troupe could be slaughtered while he hid and watched.In a nutshell: badly written, horribly acted, gay cinematics with very annoying characters, awful dancing and far too long. Does having two great-looking girls and a bit of wire-fu make for a good film? Hell, no... it does, however, possibly spare this offensively bad, pretentious, steaming pile of dog crap from a 1.

david-dodd I'm a big fan of Chinese movies, Ziyi Zhang and Shakespeare, so I was definitely looking forward to this movie. The story is inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet and does an excellent job of translating the classic to an historic setting at the end of the Tang dynasty. I especially enjoyed the reinterpretation of Hamlet's mother as Prince Wu Luan's former lover (there was always something uncomfortably incestuous in Shakespeare's original). The acting is superb with kudos to both Ziyi Zhang and You Ge for creating a pair of very complex characters as Empress and Emperor. Some of the dialog is poetic in spite of not being Shakespearean. The sets were sumptuous. And Qing Nu's song at the end was beautiful!So where did it go wrong? Except for Qing's song, the rest of the music was annoyingly obtrusive. Most of the action scenes were stylized and shot in slow motion. And many times the annoying music was playing during the slow motion action sequences, which effectively doubled the annoyance. Only the Prince's "audition" was a meaningful, well constructed action sequence. Finally, it could have been edited better with the movie reduced by about 15 minutes. There were several scenes that just didn't make sense. For example, there is a beautiful shot of Empress Wan entering the water naked, but it has no relation to what came before or after (ok, maybe that scene doesn't need context, but it just seemed out of place).Overall, a decent movie with flashes of brilliance but having one too many flaws to rank any higher.