William Bibbiani Reviews Jet Li in The Warlords!
The Warlords, opening this weekend, is the kind of Chinese action movie that doesn’t act like a Chinese action movie. Sure, there are epic battle scenes and it stars Jet Li (Hero, Shaolin Temple) and Andy Lau (The Duel, and the bizarre and underrated Running on Karma), but The Warlords is a period drama, damn it, about heterosexual male fidelity, love triangles and moral compromise in pursuit of political reform. Consequently, despite the occasionally awesome action sequence (that is to say, two of them), the movie will disappoint the typical Chinese action fans. Unfortunately, it’s bound to disappoint just about everyone else as well, since The Warlords isn’t nearly as good as it thinks it is.
Jet Li stars as Pang Qingyun, a Qing army general during the Taiping Rebellion of the 1860’s. At the start of the film he arises from the corpses of his slaughtered army, and realizes he is the only survivor. Emotionally devastated, he wanders aimlessly before befriending the beautiful and kindly Liansheng (Xu Jinglei of The Stormriders) and seeking shelter with a group of a bandits led by Zhao Er-Hu (Lau) and Zhang Wen-Xiang (the increasingly great Takeshi Kaneshiro of The House of Flying Daggers and Red Cliff). Qingyun convinces Er-Hu and Wen-Xiang to turn their bandits into an army – under Qingyun’s command, of course – and enlist in the Qing army to care for their families and bring peace to the land.
Don’t let this still from The Warlords fool you…
They are in no rush to get to the end of this film.
A few action sequences ensue, but the story that co-directors Peter Chan (He Ain’t Heavy… He’s My Father) and Wai Man Yip (Beauty and the Breast – no, really) are actually interested in is the story of the blood oath between our three heroes, which is tested as years of war and personal conflict tear them apart. Unfortunately, this entire storyline falls apart because Pang Qingyun’s character arc never makes a lot of sense. At the start of the film he’s an emotional wreck, and then at the drop of a hat decides to start a new army. Over the course of the film he’s increasingly corrupted by the practicalities of war and politics, but he never seems to confide in the characters who are supposedly closest to him, and the result is a central character who elicits no audience sympathy, and whose actions never feel appropriately justified. He’s just there, doing things, and there’s no real reason to care.
Much to the film’s detriment, The Warlords doesn’t really focus on Jet Li.
So with our central protagonist falling by the wayside this epic film has to rely on spectacle to maintain audience interest, and although there are two truly solid battle sequences in the first half of the movie there is nothing to sustain the momentum they create afterwards. The Warlords instead makes concerted efforts not to entertain us, as if the filmmakers completely shot their 2nd Unit budget halfway through production. Instead we get melodramatic – and completely unearned – attempts at Shakespearean tragedy that instead come across like an epic Chinese Menace II Society. At repeated points throughout the film, Er-Hu spills a drink on the ground out of respect for a fallen comrade… Sure, it’s a cultural difference, but the image of emptying a forty of malt liquor on the sidewalk is impossible to strike from one’s head.
Jet Li manages to look both pissed off and very, very snuggly in The Warlords.
The Warlords isn’t so much awful as it is awfully dull, and is only worth recommending to hardcore Jet Li enthusiasts, or people who want to make last year’s incredible Red Cliff look even better in comparison. Action enthusiasts, or film enthusiasts in general, would do well to seek out Chang Cheh’s Blood Brothers (sometimes called Dynasty of Blood), which shares alarming similarities with The Warlords from pretty much every perspective and is in almost every respect the superior film. (The filmmakers have denied its influence, although The Warlords was originally called Blood Brothers too.) Even so, The Warlords offers nothing new or particularly compelling to filmgoers of any persuasion, and is probably best left in relative obscurity.
The Warlords, from Magnolia Films, directed by Peter Chan and Wai Man Yip, starring Jet Li, Andy Lau, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Xu Jinglei, opens theatrically on Friday, April 2nd.
