It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen a martial arts movie so dressed up for Sunday church as “Hero.” Directed by Zhang Yimou, who greatly amplifies the exquisite use of color in his “Ju Dou,” “Hero” has a voluptuous surface designed by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, plus gorgeous production design, costume design and scoring, including the insertion of violin solos by Itzhak Perlman. Sequences are color-coded. Even the editing is as unerring as the frame around a Rembrandt. Fabulous-looking present. If it were tucked under the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, everyone would be too distracted to notice the lights above. Looking beneath the surface is another matter. “Hero,” which premiered in Beijing in December 2002, is another of the films, like “The Emperor’s Shadow” (1996) and “The Emperor and the Assassin” (1999), that looks stylistically at intrigues centering on the King of Qin (Chen Daoming), the first emperor of China 2,200 years ago. A heroic figure called Master Nameless (Jet Li) appears at the palace for an interview with the king and to describe his exploits in dispatching the king’s would-be assassins. Through a series of stories, and sometimes stories within stories, we learn of Nameless’ encounters with the warrior Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), Sword’s warrior-mistress Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), Snow’s maid Moon (Zhang Ziyi), who yearns for Sword, and the warrior Sky (Donnie Yen). Individual combat sequences flow back and forth from slo-mo to fast-mo and involve aerial ballet (shades of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) in which combatants fly, glide and float over trees and shimmering lakes. The screenplay by Zhang, Li Feng and Wang Bin drifts into portentous instructive passages: Calligraphy and swordplay share the same principle; martial arts and music are comparable disciplines. Take Li and Perlman, for example … Armies march and ride in such impressive visual designs that reality and CGI (computer-generated imagery) blend seamlessly. To “Hero’s” credit, it attempts to address the nature of truth. Is Nameless who he’s believed to be, whoever that is• Or the most cunning of assassins• Like Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece “Rashomon” — remade in many forms, including most closely the American “The Outrage” — “Hero” visualizes different takes on a story. But narrative is its weakest component. And because we have no direct means of appraising what our eyes and the English subtitles tell us, and because the characters are superficially acted (save Daoming as the king), it’s seldom possible to separate fact from fabrication, or either from sensual overload. We’re looking at dexterous stick figures in an operatically staged epic. But then, for many it will be enough that “Hero” is so sumptuous. Additional Information:

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‘Hero’ Director : Zhang Yimou Stars : Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung MPAA rating : PG-13 for stylized martial arts violence and a scene of sensuality

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