The Warlords (2007)

In the spirit of House of Flying Daggers (2004), director Peter Ho-Sun Chan brings us The Warlords, a muddled historical epic which stars Jet Li.  Li is Qing-Yun, the only survivor of a vicious battle between the Taiping rebels and the Imperial Ching Army.  Taken in by Er-Hu (Andy Lau) and Wu-Yang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Qing-Yun swears a blood oath with his new brothers.  What follows then, for the most part, is a series of battles in which the three blood brothers claim victory after victory.  Ultimately, things go a bit pear-shaped when Wu-Yang discovers that Qing-Yun is very much in love with Er-Hu’s wife, Mi Lan (Xu Jinglei). 

      This is the kind of film where you spend half your time reading the sub-titles just so that you can figure out what is going on.  Presented in the Mandarin language throughout, The Warlords is not the grand, spectacular epic that it purports to be.  Chan’s tentative, careless direction is something of a letdown.  The film lacks the colour and vibrancy which distinguished the director’s previous work.  There is also a lack of dramatic emphasis when it comes to the love triangle.  Clearly, this was a last minute editing job because insufficient time is devoted to this key aspect of the story.  Don’t even get me started on the dialogue – a comic book has more subtlety.  As for the music, it sounds like something out of a second-rate B-Movie.  So, with bad dialogue and score, surely it could not get any worse.  Well, you would be wrong there because the cinematography is not much better.  There is meaningless use of shadows as well as backlight which illustrates the lack of imagination on the part of cameraman Arthur Wong. 

      With all of its slow-motion action sequences, The Warlords is sort of a poor cousin to House of Flying Daggers.  Had there been more focus on the plot and less on spectacle, this would have been a half-decent picture.  Alas, the film proves that not every historical epic is equipped with excellence in screenwriting.