Seven Swords Movie Review:


This wuxia tale from 17th century China is filmed like a sweeping epic, with a complicated plot, lots of colourful characters and scene after scene of breathless action. But while it looks beautiful (and gruesome), it's much harder to follow than crossover hits from this genre like Hero, House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

To stop insurgence, the Qing emperor simply outlaws marshal arts. His general Fire-wind (Sun) sees this as a chance for riches and power, so he plots a trail of destruction across the nation, heading for a notoriously feisty village. But they're ready for him: seven inventive sword-wielders are prepared to protect their people at any cost--a warrior (Yen), thinker (Lai), lover (Yi), wise man (Lau), loner (Tai), optimist (Chow) and a woman (Young) who still needs to discover herself. It's going to get messy.

The film is almost pure action, with brief interludes to establish character interaction, romance and politics before we launch into another astonishing sequence of unbridled grisliness. Tsui films this spectacularly, with a fine eye for colour, landscape, fight choreography and human faces--it looks gorgeous, and he spends a lot of time developing the characters and their interaction. On the other hand, the action scenes extremely disorienting, shot in close-up and edited away from key moments so we're never quite sure what's happening until it's all over.

This incoherent approach seeps into the entire film. Indeed, it's very hard to get into from the start, since we have little idea who's who when names like Mud-trot and Stone-beast are being thrown around. But once the plot kicks in, there's an over-arching resonance that makes it worth sticking through. There are two lovely romances in here, one of which has added weight since both the man and woman are outsiders. The mad-eyed villains seem to have wandered in from a Mad Max movie, which adds a level of electric terror. And the story is full of clever twists and turns, with grounded and gritty performances. But it really makes your head spin, and not in a good way.



Rich Cline

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