SINGAPORE: It has come to the point where you can't tell one mega-budget Asian blockbuster from the other.

The latest arrival: The Assembly, a film about the Chinese civil war in the 1940s. It's the second wham-bam action film, after The Banquet (2006), from mainland Chinese director Feng Xiaogang. It also comes hot on the heels of Peter Chan's Qing Dynasty war saga, The Warlords.

This is the kind of grand-scale film-making which was kick-started, in part, by the extraordinary success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

The Lee Ang martial arts film grossed over US$213 million (S$305 million) worldwide and grabbed four Academy Awards.

But since then, film critics observe that the quality of these wow-'em-off-their-seats blockbusters has been largely uneven.

For a start, the cast is invariably picked from a familiar slate — Chow Yun Fatt, Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Andy Lau, Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro. They are, of course, the most bankable stars in Asia, but surely it's tiresome for audiences to be offered the same combo meal?

The storyline, too, is not exactly original — spinning the same yarn around a court intrigue, an assassination of a monarch, a love triangle, or all of the above.

And with the bean counters breathing down their necks, directors are hard-pressed to pull out all the stops — to the detriment of their work.

Take, for instance, Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). The sets and costumes were so over-the-top that LA Weekly described it as "a lavishly over-decorated period melodrama".

Or how, in The Promise (2005), director Chen Kaige showed his inept handling of computer-generated effects by making Korean actor Jang Dong-Gun run around like a Looney Tunes cartoon?

This is what I'd call nouveau-riche film-making — directors who were used to shoestring budgets get carried away by the amount of money at their disposal. Little wonder then that in the West, the novelty of their films has waned.

Compare the US box-office performance of Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002), which made US$53 million, with his 2003 film, House of the Flying Daggers, which turned in just US$11 million. But that's not stopping the bandwagon from rolling forward — simply because it's doing superbly well in China. Curse of the Golden Flower made 15 million yuan (S$2.95 million) in just five hours. The Warlords grossed 10 million yuan in six.

Thus, you can expect more of such period spectacles. These include two competing adaptations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Red Cliff, directed by John Woo with Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro sharing top billing, and Resurrection of the Dragon, directed by Daniel Lee and starring Andy Lau and Sammo Hung.

There's also what is touted to be Asian cinema's most ambitious project yet — a US$250-million trilogy based on The Water Margin, helmed by Andrew Lau.

A case of too much, too soon, perhaps? - TODAY/fa