Red Cliff, misdirected by John Woo, is a state-produced Chinese movie about men with dense, flowing black locks who enjoy wearing various armored outfits and commanding tens of thousands of expendable soldiers to their annihilation.
These men spend the majority of their screen time making awkward and sometimes creepy faces at the camera and at one another as they predict the weather ("If, during a warm winter, the clouds enshroud the sun, then a southeast wind will blow ...") and dictate nonsensical military philosophy at their numerous underlings. The remainder of the film is taken up by tedious violence of the most ludicrous order.
There is a strange echo of that scene from Shakespeare in Love in which Gweneth Paltrow gets spun out of her boob-binding wrap, but this supposed princess outdoes Viola De Lesseps by disguising herself as a soldier of the enemy and living in their midst for days as she sketches a map of their encampment on her boob-binding wrap; upon her return, greeted by her brother (a king) and all his buddies (generals and other important people), she starts undressing and insists upon getting spun out of her binding in front of everybody until it is finally revealed that J. C. Penney had some market share in women's underthings during the Three Kingdoms era.
Lest we forget that this is a John Woo extravaganza, there is this:
The U.S. release runs 150 minutes, and I felt every single one. It comes close to being so bad that it is awesome, and it partly succeeds by being so bad, but it is clearly not awesome. It made me ponder the essence of movies that are so bad that they are awesome.
Incredibly, in Asia it was released as a 2-part thinger running 280 minutes long combined. It was also a huge success, grossing $125 million worldwide. If we generously assume that each ticket pair was $20, more than six million people spent 280 minutes absorbing Woo-induced gore and facial contortions. That is 1,680,000,000 minutes that the world will never get back. Do yourself a favor.
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