MARTIAL ARTS 'PROMISE' BOTH WEAVES, CHOPS INTRICATE PLOT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Chen Kaige is the latest serious Chinese director to tackle the martial arts fantasy genre. But while it's eye-popping to a sometimes lunatic extent, Chen's ``The Promise'' never gets up to speed with such works as his countryman Zhang Yimou's ``Hero'' and ``House of Flying Daggers'' or Taiwanese Ang Lee's ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.''

This despite a good portion of Chen's movie being devoted to dashing around like Road Runner. And in spite of the collaboration of two of ``CTHD's'' most distinguished artisans, cinematographer Peter Pau and production designer Tim Yip. Even what's been reported as the biggest budget ever for a People's Republic production fails to make ``The Promise'' work. For Western viewers, anyway; Chen's movie is China's top box-office draw this year and has reportedly only been outgrossed by ``Titanic'' over there.

Obviously, the filmmaker knew what he was doing (Chen also came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay). And undoubtedly, familiarity with Chinese legends and genre conventions makes the more wackazoid narrative elements play better. Still, overwrought and hokey tend to transcend cultural barriers, and that's a lot of what we're looking at here.

The story involves goddesses and childhood pacts/curses and mistaken identities and lots of elaborately uniformed soldiers and legendary armor and magical cloaks and the world's most beautiful woman and ...

But let's start with the first big action sequence, which involves about a million crazed bulls chasing two warring armies through a box canyon. The CG animals look fake, as do the humans in any wide shots.

This video-game aesthetic just doesn't register after we've seen what ``Lord of the Rings'' could do with large-canvas digital combat.

Anyway, out of this debacle rises Kunlun (Jang Dong-Gun), a lowly slave whose ability to outrun stampeding bovines - sometimes even sideways, on perpendicular canyon walls - impresses the great General Guangming (Hiroyuki Sanada). He anoints Kunlun his servant, and when the general is wounded while riding to save his besieged king, the slave dons his distinctive Crimson Armor and heads to the rescue instead.

But, uh, complications arise. Kunlun ends up saving beauteous consort Qingcheng (Cecilia Cheung) instead. She thinks he's Guangming, whom she falls in love with when they actually meet, even though she's been cursed since childhood to lose every man she truly loves. Kunlun, of course, loves Qingcheng, too, but is loyal to his master, so he keeps his mouth shut. But the evil Duke Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse), who's pretty much taking over everything, also covets the babe (during the several instances when she's his captive, he literally keeps Qingcheng in a gilded cage). And don't get me started on Wuhuan's own indentured warrior, the black-cloaked super-assassin Snow Wolf (Liu Ye); man, has this guy got issues.

Got all that? It gets a lot more complicated. And that's just the plot. The pictures are even more elaborate.

Besides all the Flash-speed running around, there's a lot of flying (a kind of parasailing, befeathered Qingcheng makes a pretty striking, if goofy image), intricate yet often thrill-deficient fighting (dug Wuhuan's sharp-pointed fan weapon the most) and baffling bouncing around in space and time. When the bad CG isn't distractingly evident, most scenes are quite gorgeously composed. But that aggravates another one of ``The Promise's'' problems. It's all so mythic that the passionate emotions everyone's supposed to be feeling just don't make the all-important human connection. And when everything is shot in the most heroic perspective, no key visuals really stand out.

Chen has made ravishing, deeply moving historical works such as ``Life on a String'' and ``Farewell, My Concubine.'' His epic about ancient China's unification, ``The Emperor and the Assassin,'' was lumbering and dramatically inert but boasted some of the finest large-scale tableaux this side of Akira Kurosawa. ``The Promise'' has a lot going on and perhaps even too much to look at.

Overflowing as it is, though, it's pretty thin stuff compared to the earlier films.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

THE PROMISE - Two and one half stars

(PG-13: violence, sex)

Starring: Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong-Gun, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse, Liu Ye.

Director: Chen Kaige.

Running time: 1 hr. 43 min.

In a nutshell: Expensive Chinese martial arts fantasy is often self-consciously beautiful (except when the computer graphics aren't up to snuff), but has even less story logic than most cheap Hong Kong programmers. In Mandarin with English subtitles.