Epic is a triumph for John Woo

"Red Cliff," reputed to be the most expensive Asian film ever made, is an epic, kinetic, frenetic, jaw-dropper of an action film -- a big ol' movie, the way "Lawrence of Arabia" was a big ol' movie.

Into each Chinese auteur's life, it seems, a feudal epic will eventually fall, and this one is John Woo's. Set in the third century, "Red Cliff" is about the birth of a modern China, a subject of endless fascination to Chinese audiences, if recent film history is any indication. And it's a subject whose details are serpentine: Keeping track of who's who and what's what in "Red Cliff" is daunting at first, but it gets easier as the characters take form, something Woo manages to do fairly effortlessly while killing off millions of extras. In brief, the powerful Han Empire's scheming prime minister, Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), has convinced his feckless emperor to allow a southward campaign to crush the two troublesome warlords -- Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen) -- who stand in the way of a single China. In addition to his lust for power, Cao Cao has another motive -- his lust for Xiao Qiao (Chiling Lin), wife of Sun Quan's viceroy, Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) and the Helen of Troy of this epic, poetic romance.

Woo, whose bullets-and-ballet esthetic made him the pinnacle of Hong Kong action cinema in the late '80s and '90s, has always had a choreographer's soul, but "Red Cliff" indicates that he might, in a past life, have been a military genius. Woo may not have invented the "tortoise formation," a series of concentric semi-circles into which Cao Cao's cavalry rides to its doom, but the way it is shot is fantastic. The sequence in which Kongming outwits the better-armed enemy by luring their arrows onto boats filled with straw (where they can be collected and reused) is nerve-wrackingly funny, and the enormous, climactic conflagration has an almost joyous scope.

The computer-generated imagery that makes so much of "Red Cliff" possible is served up in heaping, state-of-the-art helpings, and the results occasionally slip into the cartoonish. At the same time, "Red Cliff" is a classic tale that gets a classicist's treatment. And it's a triumphant return for the grand old man who, once upon a time in Hong Kong, made "Bullet in the Head" and "A Better Tomorrow," but can still show the fantasy/action boys how it's done.

Anderson is a freelance reviewer.

*** 1/2 R. At Landmark's E Street Cinema. Contains epic warfare. 148 minutes.