Have Swords, Will Pack Theaters

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When Tsui Hark last year became the first Chinese director to serve on the Cannes Film Festival jury, some feared the experience might corrupt him. Would he start making his movies with a Gallic flair, replacing cut-and-slash kung fu with fashionable explorations of anomie? Would the Riviera sunlight cook his brain until he was convinced that he must forsake epic gangster cinema for experiments in narrative impenetrability? Would Hong Kong's action godfather, the man who introduced the world to John Woo and Jet Li, lose his Hong Kongness?

Lay your worries to rest. Tsui Hark hasn't lost sight of the most important objective of any Hong Kong filmmaker: pleasing the audience. In his new movie, Seven Swords, he has dipped into the endless supply of old Chinese wuxia (martial arts) novels to come up with a gritty and extremely violent epic. Noble warriors literally descend from the mountaintop to protect an endangered village from an implacable evil—think Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in Qing-dynasty China. While the attempts at romantic subplots fizzle and the film is paced so strangely that it feels both too long and too short, for fans of wuxia, Seven Swords will still satisfy. Every time the plot threatens to twist itself into knots, Tsui lets loose with eye-popping, inventive battles that express far more emotion than the stilted dialogue. In Seven Swords, the blade is the thing.

From the start, though, it's clear that Swords is a martial-arts movie of a different metal. The recent wuxia work of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou—art-house directors who dipped into the popular genre—fused poetry with action. Heroes soared through the air as though composed of pure light. Swords, however, is fixed firmly to the earth, a production of dust and blood and stone. In the jolting opening scene, the villainous Fire-wind's (Sun Hong-lei) army mows through an innocent town with all the subtlety of a chain saw. Dressed like members of some death-metal rock band, complete with pale white makeup and black leather body armor, the bad guys decapitate and dismember with glee, wielding savage hooks and spears. Tsui's camera lingers on slashed throats and chopped hands twitching in the dirt. Even the good guys use massive medieval swords with serrated edges, weapons that seem better suited to Conan the Barbarian than elegant martial-arts masters. The brutality is underscored by the harsh desert scenery of Xinjiang. Tsui takes out the arts and leaves the martial—but it's arresting to watch.

When Fire-wind sets his sights on Martial Village—so named because everyone there studies martial arts, a big no-no for the new Qing Emperor—the townspeople enlist the help of fighters from the local holy mountain, each gifted with a mystical blade: the Seven Swords. Tsui's purposefully gritty visual style makes it tough to tell the players without a scorecard, but Hong Kong movie veterans Lau Kar-leung, Leon Lai and Donnie Yen lead the way in thrashing Fire-wind's warriors, despite odds of about 1,500 to 7.

Seven Swords doesn't quite take a place among the classics. Hong Kong action movies once blossomed because talented directors like Tsui were paired with charismatic actors like Chow Yun-fat, who could elevate a genre picture with his mere presence. Sadly, the Hong Kong film industry has suffered a power drain in recent years, as no new performers have proved capable of filling the shoes of fleeing stars like Chow. Yen can knock out 100 bad guys without breaking into a sweat, but as the romantic lead in Swords, he makes the stolid Jet Li look like Cary Grant. The actresses Charlie Yeung and Korean Kim So Yuen barely register.

The performers may show less personality than the swords, but that doesn't hold the movie back too much—we're not here for character development. Tsui will be taking Swords to the Venice Film Festival, where it earned the prestigious opening spot. Don't expect the Mediterranean atmosphere to change him. Tsui can go to France and he can shoot in China, but he's still a Hong Kong filmmaker at heart.