Mulan
   
     
Director: Jingle Ma
Year:  2009
Rating: 5.0
If Mulan had been a real historical figure as opposed to a mythical legend, this version of Mulan would have been much closer to the real deal than the 1964 Shaw Brothers version that I just saw. Not just because there is no singing in this one - but the playful tone of that older one plus nothing really bad happening to any one in 12 years of war is clearly not even attempting to be in the neighborhood of the reality of war. It is just a wonderfully warm film that is about friendship, family and country. For the Hong Kong of that era there was always a need to connect to Old China before the Communists took over. Especially from the Shaw Brothers who were brought up in China.



This version was produced by the Mainland and the mood is totally different. It is dark, grim, unrelenting and without a spark of joy or laughter within. It is constant warfare and comrades die, betrayal occurs and misery abounds. It is as if they wanted to take previous versions of Mulan and proclaim them cheap lies and grind those versions into the dustbin of history. Now Mulan is a great warrior and the only attempts really at hitting emotional targets is in the patriotic speeches of dying for your country. Everything else lands like a dull thud from a broken down boxer. This seems surprising to me because the director is Jingle Ma, who often creates these fizzy, shiny films of bright cheerful colors and charming if not very deep stories like Fly Me to Polaris, Summer Holiday, the three Raiders films and of course that great classic Para Para Sakura. All films as light as a spring morning on helium. But he must have been under orders - make this drab, make it realistic, make it about love of country, make Mulan a patriot who is even more relevant today.



It even amazingly almost leaves out the emotional resonance of the love for family as it spends a minute up front in which Mulan (Vicki Zhao) takes the place of her sick father (Yu Rong-guang) and departs to war without a word. It just seemed an opportunity to make us care about the character of Mulan - make her real - but instead she is never smiling, never flirtatious, as dour as a loveless spinster of 80. And in fact the film somehow manages to make us not care about any of the characters - not an easy thing to do - not even the man (Chen Kun) she falls in love with - in as wimpy and colorless a love story as can be imagined. Throughout I kept thinking will someone besides her goofy cousin who also joins the army show some personality. He is played by Jaycee Chan and is the only small spark of life in the film.



There is a fair amount of action - perhaps too much because so much of it is similar - how much can you do to change things up as two armies charge each other. Though in fairness the one large scale battle near the end has some style to it. It is choreographed by Stephen Tung-wai who has been doing great action choreography since the late 1970's - A Better Tomorrow, Magnificent Warriors, The Twin Dragons, The Blade being among his best - but what made his choreography great in those films was either the imaginative gunplay or great one on one martial arts. Here it is just a bunch of men crunched together like a cattle show swinging blades at one another. Big budget, nice production values, lots of extras, great armor - but they forgot to buy a little heart - something I find in a lot of these large scale Mainland films that take themselves too seriously.