The only reason Red Cliff is playing at the Angelika and not in the megaplexes where its spiritual cousins make their millions is that it’s in Chinese. Otherwise, its plot seems stripped straight from a big house, blockbuster feast. In John Woo’s film, a motley crew of underdogs must come together to stop a powerful leader bent on total domination using only their wits and their courage. The story comes from the classic work of Chinese literature The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it concerns Zhou Yu (Tony Leung), Dongming (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Sun Quan (Chen Chang), lords of the Southlands, who must protect their people from the predations of Cao Cao (Fengyi Zang), who has stolen the power of the Han Emperor and made himself Chancellor, a title which is the supreme mark of a cinematic villain. At Red Cliff, the noble Southern army aspires to be a Hollywood blockbuster and succeeds – which is no small feat, one must remember, anywhere outside of Hollywood.

Some press for the film, and possibly even director John Woo himself, have claimed that Red Cliff is more historical than fictional, abandoning the mythological Romance of the Three Kingdoms for more measured accounts. But when the conflict has its origin in Cao Cao’s obsessive love for Zhou Yu’s wife rather than in political issues, when military strategies seem chosen for their cinematographic possibilities rather than their martial effectiveness, and when a heroic general can knock a horse to the ground with an open-palm strike, the audience can be sure it is watching melodrama. The characters, all generals and lords, are like the kings of the Iliad, able to cut swaths through unnamed peons in order to duel mano-a-mano with their noble counterparts. That the good guys all claim to be fighting for the little people is undercut by the film’s refusal to humanize even one of those characters meant for arrow fodder. For a film made in a Communist country, even for one based on medieval tales, Red Cliff is remarkably aristocratic.

The impressive action sequences are the film’s only true strong point, likely because the American version has been cut from two films totaling over four hours to a single film of about two and a half hours. Most of the characters are little more than roles, although Tony Leung and newcomer Chiling Lin, playing husband and wife, are elegant in their displays of (mostly) restrained passion and stoic courage. Fengyi Zang as Cao Cao is also able to bring a little bit of the subtlety he showed in the great but overlooked Emperor and the Assassin. On the other hand, Leung’s Chungking Express co-star, Takeshi Kaneshiro, seems massively out of place with his boyish looks and bird-feather fan. The cut version also lacks any plot subtlety, although the audience never loses track of the plot or characters, a decent accomplishment for a film so large. The greatest disappointment was that the film’s touted “stunning visuals” were all a paper tiger; although there was one breathtaking shot, the rest of the film’s grandiose battle formations and sweeping landscapes leave one with the impression that one has seen it all before – in The Lord of the Rings.

Red Cliff is certainly better than most of the epic genre, such as Troy or Kingdom of Heaven, but offers nothing unique in the way of the unconventional vision and style offered by other Chinese period films well-known in America, like Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Regardless, this is a movie where a man punches a horse in the middle of a melee, and that may be worth the price of admission.

Red Cliff is playing at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas.