Review of House of Flying Daggers

I was really looking forward to this movie, having just seen Hero, director Zhang Yimou's previous and, to my mind, very successful foray into the Asian martial art ballet genre.
It occurs to me, that's what these things are. Like opera and ballet, they are highly stylized and mythologized imaginings of the real thing, and as such, they run the risk of being way, way, way over the top.
Hero's underlying themes of sacrifice for ideals and the greater good gave it enough mass to ground its operatic elements so they didn't spin the movie off into silliness. Regrettably, House of Flying Daggers, never achieves critical mass.
Indeed, by the end of the movie, during what should have been a dramatic showdown between the players in a love triangle set amongst a struggle between a corrupt government and a band of robin-hood-like rebels, half the audience laughed out loud. I was one of their number.
In this overly long and drawn out scene, each of the triangle is mortally wounded, but rather than die, two continue to fight while the third staggers around like I used to as a kid, pretending to be shot. (See my suggestion for new title above. ) And that wasn't what people laughed about. There was something even funnier than that, but you'll have to see the movie to know what that something is. ;-)
They are plenty of other silly, improbable happenings in the movie including daggers that can defy the laws of Physics, and an Army seen advancing toward the fighting love triangle near the end that is never seen again. Perhaps it is lost and wandering that forest even still. Who knows? But what makes it hard to overlook these problems is the "love" story never engaged me and the fight between the robin hoods and the government was hollow in that once mentioned by a text scrawl at the beginning of the film, it was dropped--not even one scene to illustrate the corruption or the rebels courage in opposing it.
So what could have been a morally complex tale of shifting and conflicting loyalties was, in the end, a flat and tepid tale.
It got two stars only because some of the fight choreography is worth a rental to check out. Zhang Ziyi is nice to look at too. That's really about it.