Blades of the Guardians

by Mike McGranaghan

Blades of the Guardians has an impressive pedigree. The director is Yuen Woo-ping, maker of Drunken Master and Iron Monkey, as well as the man who choreographed the fight sequences in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The cast is comprised of Chinese all-stars, including Nicholas Tse (Raging Fire), Tony Leung Ka Fai (The Last Emperor), Max Zhang (Ip Man 3), and the legendary Jet Li, who hasn’t been onscreen since Mulan six years ago. Despite all these exciting people coming together, the movie doesn’t live up to expectations.

I'd tell you who those actors play, but a major problem is that the story keeps adding new characters without properly introducing them, so it isn’t clear who many of them are or how they’re connected. (Listing their names and titles when they first appear doesn’t help.) The plot concerns the efforts of bounty hunter Dao Ma (Jing Wu) to transport a resistance figure/fugitive to Chang’an. There are gangs of people who don’t want this to happen, leading to a series of deadly confrontations.

Action sequences in Blades of the Guardians are ingeniously conceived and carried out. One takes place on an oil field that has been ignited. Aside from waving flaming swords, the combatants fling handfuls of oil at each other. Another takes place inside a massive dust storm, with everyone struggling to not blow away while they brawl. Swordplay and martial arts fights offer fast-paced mayhem, with the kind of creative staging Yuen Woo-ping is known for.

Unfortunately, you have to sit through a dull, confusing story to get to those action scenes. With an overload of characters, it’s impossible to develop any of them to a point you become invested in what they’re doing. They populate the screen without making much of an impression. The plot therefore quickly grows muddled, often feeling as though it’s going in multiple directions at the same time. By the last half-hour, I gave up on trying to make sense of it. The stakes become too low to bother.

Although it’s true that martial arts flicks aren’t known for exquisite plotting, many of them are smart enough to be simple. That’s why “you killed my [whatever] so now I must kill you” is a common story arc in the genre. If the picture was just Dao Ma trying to complete his mission, it would have been fine, but there’s also a kid, Dao’s benefactor, another bounty hunter, a prisoner, and more. The excess of players dilutes the film’s core idea.

Watching Blades of the Guardians is an exercise in patience-testing. When the brutal, bloody action starts, the movie entertains. When it ends, the fun comes to a screeching halt. There’s some undeniably great stuff in here. The question is whether you’re willing to endure the not-so-great parts of this ambitious, yet overly chaotic epic.

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