Grade: A-

Verdict: The birth of a nation, Chinese style.

Details: Starring Gong Li and Li Xuejian. Directed by Chen Kaige. Rated R for violence. 2 hours, 40 minutes.

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Review: As bloody as a Greek tragedy, as sweeping as a Kurosawa epic and as humanly scaled as a Shakespearean drama, "The Emperor and the Assassin" is quite an accomplishment. Why it wasn't nominated for best foreign-language film suggests Oscar politics even more byzantine than those on-screen here.

Though it's too long and occasionally confusing (there's an immense cast of power players), Chen Kaige's ("Farewell My Concubine") movie has the kind of panoramic impact and epic flourish that the new generation of films using computer-generated images lack.

In 221 B.C., China consists of six rival kingdoms. Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian), the king of Qin, decides to make the unification of China "a personal crusade." Away from the battlefield (where we see that he is an efficient and brutal leader), this sounds rather noble. As he tells Lady Zhao (Gong Li), a childhood friend who's now his mistress, his vision is "peace and prosperity for all with one benevolent emperor."

She believes him. Or, more to the point, believes in him. So much so that it's she who comes up with a strategy that will give Ying Zheng license to invade and conquer a neighboring kingdom. Namely by tricking another ruler into sending an assassin after him. Only Lady Zhao will know who the assassin is and be able to tip off her beloved before he's in too much danger.

But here's where things get tricky. Lady Zhao eventually witnesses what "unification" really means: cities on fire, piles of corpses, children sacrificed by their own parents rather than have them live as slaves in Qin.

One further complication: As she becomes increasingly disenchanted with her lover, she grows closer to her chosen assassin. He's Jing Ke (Zhang Fengyi), a former lethal weapon who swore off killing after a particularly brutal assignment.

Beyond the central story, there are plots and more plots — a vast network of ambition, betrayal and intrigue. Theater managers would do their audiences a favor by handing out a chart as they go in; it's that complicated.

It helps that the cast is so strong. Gong Li, already familiar to many Western movie-lovers, is flawless as the woman caught between two very different men. Zhang Fengyi's assassin gives the story heart and a doomed-samurai sense of nobility. But the character who fascinates us is the emotional, childlike yet utterly ruthless would-be emperor. His tunnel-vision juxtaposition of power-lust justified by a higher goal seems all too recognizable more than 2,000 years later.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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