And that both of the two other reviews are positive? That is very suspicious if you ask me.
Anyway now here is my review (which you can find on my site called chrichtonsworld): In my search for everything heroic bloodshed My Heart is that Eternal Rose has popped up several times. And when you read the reviews most of them are positive. I only could find one negative review on HKMDB but that was more because the reviewer could not remember the film and was unable to track down the title to do a proper review. I don't know about you but whenever this happens my Spidey sense goes into overdrive. Even the most perfect masterpieces get negative reviews. So if those are non existent then I question the honesty of the reviewers.
Especially after having seen this film I am astonished that it gets so much praise in the first place. There is nothing extraordinary about it. In fact I think it is pretty average bordering to incredibly bad. Maybe a case could be made in favour of the camera work with the use of it's colours. But that really is about it. The supposedly brilliance of director Patrick Tam (He is known as the mentor of Wong Kar-wai.) is nowhere to be found. In fact if you ask me this film was stylish in all the wrong places. There are a lot of scenes where slow motion was used when there was no use or point to it. It only delayed the already super slow action. At one point it's used for like thirty seconds in a scene where all you see is a black wall and a little smoke. (Ok exaggeration on my part. It was more like ten seconds. But that is similar to two hours in cat years.) In another scene slow motion is used where character played by Tony Leung gets pushed out of the car. It takes forever with very little positive effect. I mean what was the point of that? Then there were some freeze frames undoubtedly for dramatic effect but here it came off as comedic. I could have overlooked the shortage of action and the misplaced stylization. But not the overly melodramatic empty triangle love story. It was tragic just for the sake of being tragic devoid of any logic or reason. It did help to have Toney Leung Chiu-Wai and Joey Wong to portray the characters. They did bring this film a little credibility. Still they were not given that much material to work with and you can tell that for the most part they felt lost. Which I assume a lot of people are confusing with artistic and symbolic depth.
Apart from the title there is nothing artistic or poetic about this film. It simply is a very poorly made movie that drags on throughout. The few action scenes that are present are far too short and not very enjoyable and therefore ultimately pointless. This film would have been more effective had it just been filming the roses (that are shown in the beginning) for 90 minutes.
Seriously this film is a waste of your time. Especially if you are looking for a decent heroic bloodshed title. This is just an overly melodramatic but incredibly minimalistic love story with no redeeming factors whatsoever. AVOID!
