Cynical Cinema

“A brother who hurts a brother must die.” 

The Warlords is an in-depth examination of human nature.  It features basically good men doing bad things, and basically bad men doing good things.  It is a movie that looks at the bonds of brotherhood, whether that bond be by birth or by blood or by blood oath.  It is a sweeping political and feudal epic set in Hong Kong in the late 1800s that delves deep into the political scene at the time, between Empresses, governors, military generals and faceless men behind the scenes.  And it’s also a movie where a guy gets his torso blown graphically into tiny pieces thanks to a close-up encounter with a cannon.

The Warlords is all those things, and more.  And less.  It is so ambitious, and done on such a large scale, that it can’t possibly score on every front.  The love-triangle, deception story, can’t possibly be fully fleshed out, so to speak, because that would mean there would be less time for limb-hacking and face-stabbing and all that Braveheart battle type stuff.  The behind-the-scenes political manouevering must necessarily be touched on only briefly, because there just isn’t time to go fully into it.  So the corruption and the backstabbing and the callousness of these people is treated as a de facto problem in life.  Like, of course they are evil.

What really works, however, is the idea of the ends justifying the means.  In a movie about love, war, politics, history and loyalty, only the loyalty and the war get really in-depth treatment.  Even when the movie ends, we do not know if the ends for certain characters really justified their means.  As in another Jet Li classic, Hero, we are left with a sense of sadness at the end of the movie (for different reasons - I’m not about to give away the ending to this one).  We wonder whether the world is actually better off, and whether the characters we have come to know are better off.

But that’s another small problem with the film.  We have indeed come to know the four central characters - three men who have taken a blood oath to be loyal to each other to the death, and the woman who throws a bit of a wrench into that whole plan.  But we haven’t come to know them enough to necessarily like them.  When they do good things, and make noble speeches, we think oh, OK.  They’re doing a good thing.  And when they do bad things and kill the wrong people, we think oh, OK.  They’re doing something with which I don’t particularly agree.  And we move on.  If any of these characters were to die, I wouldn’t be terribly upset about it.  They are not so sympathetic that I identify with any of them.

So, in some ways, The Warlords plays a little like a documentary.  Of course it isn’t even a biopic or anything like that, but it moves in a workmanlike manner from one plot development to the next.  Here is Jet Li getting to know the girl.  Now he meets the bandits.  He becomes blood brothers with them.  He convinces them to join the army.  They win a great victory and their families get fed.  Now the politicians are playing sneaky games.  Here comes another battle.  And that’s all we really get.  Which is fine, because I was totally blown away by the sweeping camera work, the massive battle scenes and the terrific lead actors (especially Li and Andy Lau, one of my favourite Hong Kong actors).

In the end, the message is fairly ambiguous, and that’s the way it should be.  It makes you really think, and the final scenes (including one that is reminiscent of one of the coolest scenes in Cool Hand Luke) manage to conjure up some power that is surprising given the clinical nature of much of the rest of the movie.  And by then, we have begun to really feel for one of the characters, who appears to slowly lose his mind as the movie goes on.  The Warlords really is very good, and it should be watched, by fans of great sword-fighting action war historical political movies.  Like a Chinese Braveheart.  Only shorter.  And not quite as good.  The only real problem with The Warlords is that it bit off more than it could chew.

A big key to enjoying certain movies is the suspension of disbelief. You watch Kill Bill, but you don’t question the fact that Uma Thurman can bring a samurai sword on an airplane. You watch Mpix late at night, and you believe, for that moment, that women wearing see-through lingerie order pizza and tip in unconventional ways.

No genre of movie requires the suspension of disbelief more than Hong Kong action pictures, and Kill Zone is no exception. You will have to believe many things. Getting a mob boss on video savaging an informant with a golf club can’t put him in jail because someone else shot the guy. A guy with a knife can murder well-trained cops with guns because he’s just THAT FAST. Some guys can be punched once and suffer lifelong brain damage. Other guys need to be punched fifty times by the same guy just to fall over. This sort of thing shouldn’t bother you though, because this is just today’s movie world. And Kill Zone does that world justice as a tremendously violent, adrenaline-filled epic.

Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung are two of the great Hong Kong actors unknown on this side of the ocean. They should get their due, and Kill Zone is a great argument in their favour. Suspend your disbelief and enjoy.  Kill Zone is out on Blu-Ray today, December 16th.

Asian cinema loves the Shakespeare. Akira Kurosawa based half his work on the works of the bard, most notably Ran (King Lear) and Throne Of Blood (Macbeth). And of course, Shakespeare borrowed heavily from others in terms of stories and structure, which means that his stories, and the Asian movies that accompany them, are hundreds of years old. He wrote a play called “Hamlet” that was based on the legend of Amleth, as told by the thirteenth century scholar Saxo Grammaticus. The latest movie from Alliance Films, The Legend of Black Scorpion, is a re-telling of Hamlet. Therefore, the story is about 800 years old, and it feels that way, as it should. Black Scorpion does not credit Grammaticus in the credits, but then, neither did Shakespeare.

The Legend of Black Scorpion features the incomparable Zhang Ziyi, one of the most beautiful women in all of Asian cinema. (You might remember her from such films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers and Hero.) One complaint I have with this film is that she doesn’t fight. I love watching her fight. The Emperor of China has been murdered by his own brother. That brother has usurped the throne, and taken the former Emperor’s wife as his own. The old Emperor’s son has been banished, since he is the only one who could topple the current empire and lay a legitimate claim to the throne. But when that young man fights through traps and assassins to reach the kingdom, things get all weird. And Shakespearean.

You see, this young man was once in love with the Empress. He wanted her for himself, but his father married her instead, and now she lives with the uncle who murdered his dad. They seem to still be in love, but there is another woman at the palace that he runs around with while he is waiting for his chance to take the throne, and, by extension, his step-mother. And aunt. Hmmm. How very Shakespeare. This nephew is an actor more so than he is a fighter, and he puts on plays for the amusement of the court, plays that are pointed and directed at his murderous uncle. In true Shakespearean style, these plays are carried out with all the performers wearing masks. There is some great dialogue, especially a speech about wearing a mask and acting and swordfighting. Which is really what the movie is all about.

Well, that and jealousy, betrayal, and the inability to contain one’s inner nature. There are some really cool fight scenes. Not as cool as the ones in Hero, but above-average, even for Hong Kong martial arts cinema. We are not sure whether or not we like the Empress, at least until the end of the film, and even then it’s ambiguous. There are relationships between other characters that add a lot to the movie, especially the relationship between Yin (one of the Emperor’s advisors) and his son. It reminded me a lot of the relationship between Robert The Bruce and his father in Braveheart. The old man wanting to be diplomatic, the young man headstrong and uncompromising. And yet, willing to defend his father to his last breath.

And there are a lot of last breaths in Legend of Black Scorpion. After all, it’s Hamlet. Anyone who has any knowledge of Hamlet or of Shakespearean tragedy can probably guess how this film is going to end, so it really won’t come as a surprise. But I would caution against skipping out too soon, before the credits begin to roll. The final shot in this movie is magnificent, a beautiful shot that caps everything so well it would be worth watching even if the movie was bad. But it isn’t. The Legend of Black Scorpion will not end up being a Hong Kong classic, but with good swordfights, solid acting, great dialogue and the incredible ability that Chinese directors seem to have of using colours effectively, it is well worth renting.