Review: The Warlords
As far as war films go, few films stoop as low as The Warlords,Peter Chan’s painfully stupid and unengaging post kung-fu vision starring Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro. In this painful-to-watch dung heap, Li Plays a general who survives a battle that leaves the rest of his army dead. After pulling himself out from under a mound of dead bodies, he stumbles into a crumbling village where he meets up with a band of rogues, which he soon joins. Life as a bandit doesn’t work out well for him or his new comrades however, so the group joins the regular army to begin a legitimate rape and pillage career after Li and his two closest buddies swear a blood oath.
The Warlords was supposed to mark a turning point in Chinese cinema, a step toward gritty realism and away from kung-fu fantasy. And there is no reason why this attempt should’ve failed so miserably. Li had previously sworn off the fantasy pictures that made him a household name. And Chan made numerous comments about wanting to steer clear of exaggerated action.
For whatever reason, decision makers were not able to control themselves. They infuse this film with comical fantasy violence. Sword thrusts pierce bodies as though the bodies were empty plastic cola bottles, and heroes bounce around like trained acrobats. When one of them is run through with a sword, arrow, or blunt pole, the hero shows no sign of pain. Pain is nearly as uncommon for his foe, who drops dead the moment a weapon either touches him or becomes tucked under his arm pit. Thus, the film never escapes its fate as a low-grade kung-fu war film.
Still, far be it for anyone to disparage low-grade kung-fu war films. Such films have a lot of heart, a bit of philosophical insight or some fun at very least. None of these qualities can be found in this time waster. The three new amigos sack one city after another, and the film hardly slows down to explore their friendship or even their characters. Sure the three warlords stick together through thick and thin, but there doesn’t seem to be much reason for them to do so. Their friendships are never believable.
And even less comprehendable is the love interest that is even more underdeveloped and unnecessary to the story.These weaknesses would be bad enough, but The Warlords combines its awful fantasy elements and brain dead story/character development with awful melodrama to create a total offense on anyone unlucky enough to see this film. Li’s character, for example, repeatedly makes a difficult decision to betray a friendship for a greater good. And along with this decision comes a close-up of his tearful eyes. Violins begin playing. Rain falls. Then a mournful voice-over explains the tragic consequences. It’s all so laughable, and so manipulative, that it is as if the filmmakers heard a few Hollywood stereotypes and then decided to copy them.
And just to kick this dead horse one more time, I’ll add that not only is this film stupid, it is also ugly. War is presented as game and theater, a fun adventure that any healthy teenage boy would want a piece of. If the filmmakers wished to convey such a dangerous message, they could’ve at least made the film more interesting to watch.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
i have to agree, it was pretty abysmal. the last scene, with Takeshi Kaneshiro continually saying “I must kill he who killed my brother” was just comic, it was up there with the last scene in The House of Flying Daggers in that regard. The whole trope of blood brothers is deep in Chinese literature, but packing that into 2 hours or however long the movie was is a hard feat for any filmmaker–they insisted on having such a compact script full of so many scenes, that it felt that each one was inevitably short-shrifted in the process. The whole thing just didn’t hang together.