Yuen Woo-ping has been making martial arts films since before most of today’s action directors were born, and his fingerprints are on some of the greatest fight sequences ever committed to celluloid, including (but certainly not limited to) the lobby shootout in The Matrix, the rooftop bamboo duel in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Uma Thurman carving a path through the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill (which you can now see in full color, thanks to The Whole Bloody Affair). At this point in his career — he’s well into his eighties — you could certainly forgive him for coasting a bit; instead, he’s made Blades of the Guardians, which contains some of the most inventive action choreography I’ve seen in years.
I’ll confess I hadn’t spent much time with wuxia in a while. My history with the genre runs through the obvious classics (Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers among them), but Blades of the Guardians made a convincing case that I’d been missing out if I passed on this one. Jing Wu stars as Dao Ma, a desert mercenary and bounty hunter who kicks off the film by becoming the second most-wanted fugitive along the Silk Road, then almost immediately gets recruited to escort the first most-wanted fugitive across the desert to the imperial capital. A tribal chief’s bow-wielding daughter joins the caravan; so does another bounty hunter and his latest quarry, and the group finds themselves pursued by Di Ting (Nicholas Tse), an ex-soldier with a score to settle. By the halfway point, the plot has accumulated so many intersecting grievances and shifting alliances that keeping score becomes genuinely difficult — it’s like a Game of Thrones episode, where every character also has a nickname (One-Eye, Double-Headed Snake, and Jade-Faced Ghost are just a sampling). But the oft-bewildering narrative is a lesser concern, because Woo-ping’s relentlessly inventive action sequences are the main attraction.
And look, that’s not intended as a backhanded compliment. Nearly every major confrontation in Blades of the Guardians feels like it’s showing you something new. The Mad Max: Fury Road-inspired sandstorm sequence will get most of the attention, deservedly so, but my favorite moment actually arrived much earlier in the film. A brief skirmish in an oil field, maybe three minutes from start to finish, starts with a fighter dragging his sword through the ground and flinging it toward an open flame, where the oil droplets ignite to produce something that functions like a makeshift flamethrower. It felt like something out of a video game (meant as high praise), and it only gets better from there.
Jing Wu makes for a great leading man, and the supporting cast is solid from top to bottom, with practically everyone getting their moment in the spotlight — none so memorable as Lijun Chen’s Ayuya, whose quest for vengeance turns her into the fiercest entity on the battlefield. And then there’s Jet Li, whose screentime here is considerably shorter than the film’s marketing campaign might lead you to believe, yet still manages to make a sizable impact. At 62 years old he still moves with the grace and poise that defined so many of his roles, and his big sequence, a two-on-one bout that helps establish the film’s stakes, reminds you exactly why Li became a legend in the first place. His absence from the second and third acts is felt — to be honest, I kept expecting him to pop up at any moment — but what’s there is worth every single frame.
Blades of the Guardians offers a lot to absorb over two-plus hours, and not all of it lands as one might hope, especially in the narrative department. But Woo-ping has once again proven himself a master of the genre, delivering a film packed to the gills with action that keeps finding new ways to surprise you just when you think you’ve taken its measure. If you can catch it on a big screen in your area, don’t hesitate — I promise you’ll thank me afterward.