The Eight Hundred

The Eight Hundred bites off more that it can chew but it consistently serves up gripping filmmaking on the biggest canvas.

"The Eight Hundred" fetishizes martyrdom, but for those seeking big-screen, epic violence, it's pretty much the only game in town.

Guan goes hammer and tongs with the special effects, delivering stupendously, joint-rattlingly-loud battle scenes and combat sequences edited to the lightning pace of a superhero movie.

The Eight Hundred is thin on characterization, and too often slips into rote narrative and war movie cliches.

[A]t least those who like blunt metaphors with their war movies will get a kick out of Hu's most blatant device: a majestic white horse that the NRA lets gallop through the warehouse as if rubber-stamped with the words "hope."

Plunges audiences into both the intimacy and magnitude of brutal war spectacle while immersing them in a stunningly mounted period canvas.

As bombastic and melodramatic as one might expect it to be, The Eight Hundred is also relentlessly thrilling, and exquisitely photographed on huge, practical sets.

The scale and period detail are often jaw dropping. The carnage is massive and the unflinching brutality of the fighting includes some hard-to-watch scenes where soldiers are forced at gunpoint by a sadistic commander to execute prisoners.

The benefit is a quite overwhelming, palpable realism.

It serves as a big-budget corrective to myths about war generated by Western cinema, such as the idea that Asians stood by to watch while Westerners fight their battles.