Recently becoming the most successful wuxia film of all time at the Chinese box office, Blades of the Guardians offers a duly impressive spectacle, chock-full of epic set-pieces that lean more on physical effects than CGI, and of course lashings of exquisitely choreographed fight scenes mostly using – as the title suggests – swords.
One wouldn’t expect anything else, given it is directed by veteran fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, best known to western audiences for his contributions to films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Matrix movies and Kill Bill. Asian viewers might revere him more for directing classics such as Drunken Master, the Tiger Cage pictures, Iron Monkey and many more. In addition, Blades puts megastar Wu Jing at the centre of the story, a performer who got his big break back in the 90s working with Yuen on Tai Chi Boxer. From there, Yuen fills out the cast with lots of stalwart action-movie faces, including good ol’ Jet Li as a levitating evil general and Tony Leung Ka-fai as a noble father, plus up-and-coming faces like popstar/actor Yu Shi as a bounty hunter and Chinese opera star Chen Lijun as a plucky princess who’s handy with a bow and arrow.
With all those elements in place, plus scores of extras, it doesn’t really matter what the story is about; the trick is to just sit back and enjoy the hullabaloo. True to wuxia form, the narrative is a ridiculously tangled skein of subplots, adapted from a successful comic book and all set during the medieval Sui dynasty. Wu Jing plays Dao Ma, a soldier turned bounty hunter, who is bopping around the countryside with his moppet nephew Xiao Qi, a kid of seven or eight. Dao Ma accepts a job escorting a masked revolutionary called Zhishilang (Sun Yizhou), who preaches a kind of proto-Communist egalitarian philosophy, but who is quite useless in a fight.
Most of the characters mentioned above end up joining the travelling party, or battling them, or both. Highlights include a mass battle in the middle of a sandstorm, while the climactic concluding fisticuffs unfold against the backdrop of a burning city. Indeed, just about all the elements – earth, wind and fire – get a look-in here one way or another, although water is more of an inert obstacle rather than a quarrelsome force of nature. On the downside, Yuen has a lot less flair for visual poetry than some of his previous collaborators, so the bits between the martial arts displays are a bit basic, perhaps even trite. There’s a shot of cherry blossoms being splattered with blood, for instance, and the musical score is overwrought and dreary. But hardcore wuxia fans aren’t likely to mind.