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Earlier this year, the Hong Kong Film Awards celebrated the 100th anniversary of Chinese cinema with a list of the Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures of all time. The director with the most movies on the list was Wong Kar Wai, with six, followed by Tsui Hark, with five.
The Tsui films on the list were made between 1979 and 1991-in other words, during Hong Kong cinema's golden age, when the Vietnam-born filmmaker single-handedly redefined Chinese-language genre movies. As a producer, he was even more influential, developing the talent that the world now recognizes as the epitome of the Hong Kong style: director John Woo and actors Chow Yun Fat and Jet Li.
Tsui's post-1980s career has been spottier, hurt on the one hand by a tendency to repeat past successes with diminishing returns, and on the other by the commercial downturn that plagued the Hong Kong movie industry in the late '90s. He took a stab at Hollywood, but unlike his acolyte Woo, he did not find success and returned to Hong Kong after helming two mediocre Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles.
Expectations have therefore been high for Tsui's "Qi Jian" (Seven Swords), the latest big-budget wuxia action film in the mold of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Hero." Tsui is credited with having perfected the cinematic version of wuxia, a term that describes stories about chivalrous martial artists. Tsui's "Swordsman," "Zu" and the "Once Upon a Time in China" series are considered the standard of the genre.
In fact, true Hong Kong film buffs deride recent Hollywood-backed wuxia movies by prestigious directors like Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee as being too refined. Tsui, they believed, would return wuxia to its proper station as a dramatic storytelling form for the masses. His original plans for "Qi Jian," based on a popular novel by Liang Yusheng, were ambitious: a TV series, comics, online games and six movies.
What we get is a two-and-a-half-hour film that was reportedly cut down from the four-hour version Tsui wanted to release. Having never been a stickler for narrative coherence even in his classics, Tsui sparks even more confusion with a tale that has obviously had huge chunks of plot removed.
Set during the 17th century after the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the movie gets off to a strong start with an army of bounty hunters taking advantage of an imperial decree banning all martial arts. These bloodthirsty goons, sporting Kiss-like makeup and led by a pale, punkish female warrior, slaughters an entire village just to get the heads of a few martial arts experts, each of which will bring them 300 pieces of silver.
Fire-wind (Sun Honglei), the warlord who oversees this army, has his sights set on a village in the northwest where an entire community of martial artists lives. In a muddled mix of plot advancement and character introduction, Tsui brings together a retired executioner (Lau Kar Leung, who also choreographed the fight sequences), and two former lovers (Charlie Young and Lu Yi), who help him escape from the villagers' wrath after they misunderstand his warning about Fire-wind's pending invasion.
These three travel to Mount Heaven, where they enlist the help of four swordsmen, including Yang Yunchong (played by Hong Kong star Leon Lai). These four not only possess exceptional fighting skills, but magic swords. All seven return to the village to help the inhabitants ward off Fire-wind's horde.
Film buffs have seen a connection between the plotline of "Qi Jian" and that of "The Seven Samurai," but the only reminder this writer could find of Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece was the uncanny resemblance of the Mount Heaven swordmaker to Toshiro Mifune.
Tsui's main problem is his inability to imbue his seven warriors with personalities. Donnie Yen stands out only because of his heavy metal hair and awkwardly dubbed Korean. As the half-Chinese, half-Korean swordsman Chu Zhaonan, he is given the main romantic subplot of rescuing and wooing Fire-wind's Korean love slave (Kim So Yeun). It's screen time that would have better been spent fighting, given Yen's hallowed reputation as Hong Kong's most exciting martial artist.
The action sequences are few and far between, but when they do appear you understand why real wuxia fans find the painterly "House of Flying Daggers" such a bore. Tsui serves up gore and severed limbs.
The dynamic priority of the battles, especially the climactic face-off between Chu and Fire-wind within the confines of a narrow alleyway, is more visceral than it is aesthetic. Swords clang and score walls, flesh rips, the dirt erupts into the air with each powerful blow.
Tsui's editing technique, which some believe is a gift from God, is lightning-fast and purposely disorienting. His aim is to wear you down, but chances are you'll be worn down by the lack of dramatic momentum first.
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