A Touch of Zen

 How about... a three-hour Chinese epic?

 Well, Taiwanese, to be accurate. Originally released in two parts in 1970 and 1971, A Touch of Zen was made by Shaw Brothers legend King Hu after he moved out of mainland China, but it still tells a very Chinese Wuxia story set in the Ming dynasty.

 Gu Sheng-tsai (Shih Chun) is an amiable fourteenth-century slacker who elected not to take the administrative exams to become a scholar for the government; instead, he makes a living as a scribe and painter off a stall in the market in his small town.
 But once he notices his latest out-of-town client is up to some sneaky business, he's set on a trail that ends up with him discovering that his new neighbour, the fetching Yang Hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) is being hunted by the government. Her father was a magistrate who tried to expose an eunuch's corruption and got a death sentence for his whole family instead. And now the corrupt governmental forces are closing in on her.

 The pacing is, as you'd expect from a three-hour movie... sedate. But even though there's very little action in this first hour, the plot is interesting and Gu makes for a fun protagonist. He's the lone non-fighting character in the movie - Yang turns out to be a phenomenal, monk-trained warrior, and her co-conspirators are all defecting generals and soldiers.

 Gu falls in love with Yang, and vows to help her with his, um, knowledge of war literature; Of course his strategies end up carrying the day. The second hour of the movie is a huge amount of fun, as Yang, Gu and the sympathetic local magister run a series of ambushes and stratagems to fight the overwhelming army that's coming to get her.

 This is where the movie gets properly epic. The first act was restricted to just a few locations - the town market, Gu's house, the derelict manor where Yang is crashing. But as lady Yang reveals her backstory we're treated to some stunningly beautiful landscapes, and we also get a gorgeous-looking and very cool fight at a bamboo forest.
 The climactic confrontation and culmination of Gu's planning is, unfortunately, at night, and in town, but it's a fun scene in its own right. The problem is that... well, there's still another hour before the movie finishes.

 And this is where the movie kind of lost me. The last third keeps some ties to the main story, with the pivot being a great scene where Gu goes from celebrating his successful ruse to realizing the cost it had in human life, as a group of monks come to burry the dead. But the events thereon feel a bit like leftovers from the main plot, a denouement that doesn't add a huge amount to the movie and focuses mostly on new characters - the Buddhist abbot Hui-yuan (Roy Chiao) who barely figured in the first two thirds of the story, and a new antagonist.
 Hui-yuan is a cool character - a badass, pacifist/fighting monk whose sense of justice won't let him look away from the court's excesses (although he seems to have no problem when his charges ruthlessly cut down fleeing soldiers). But his role and involvement feel vestigial to the main story and add a spiritual component that... well, it doesn't come out of nowhere, but feels extraneous, unsatisfying; the story already feels finished before he even sets foot in it. And it all leads to a mystical finale which I honestly could have done without.

 As with all of these old martial arts movies, I'm kind of grading it on a curve (I feel a bit silly saying this of what's widely considered a classic; but there's a lot here, especially the action and a lot of acting choices, that are decidedly old-fashioned). But I genuinely enjoyed it even as it dragged a bit in its last third; It's a very entertaining movie that's undeniably influential (Ang Lee is obviously a fan) and has some stand-out, beautiful action and fun characters. Well worth a watch.