I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and
it gets everywhere.
(鏢人: 風起大漠
Biao Ren)
dir: Yuen Woo-ping
2026
Okay, so Blades of the Guardians feels like a super-generic title. You could call it The Good Guys Have Feet or The Baddies Have Crooked Pinkie Fingers, and it would be just as illuminating.
It doesn’t tell you, the busy consumer of mass media and meme after meme after meme, whether this is a flick worthy of your time and attention for about two hours.
Two Hours! You could watch like 300 TikToks or reels in that space of time. You could post countless replies to some celebrity you imagine you have some meaningful parasocial relationship with on every one of their posts for the day.
You could go drinking. You could hit yourself in the face with a hammer for two hours. All sorts of fun stuff.
Movies take commitment. They require attention. Focus.
Who can be fucked with that these days, eh? In these chaotic days where new forms of terrible ideas rain down from the heavens and through our phones on the daily?
Well, I made some special time for myself, two hours uninterrupted by phone chatter or notifications or anything else and just sat and watched a goddamn movie.
And you know what? It was an enjoyable time had by all. It helps that the flick was made by the greatest Hong Kong fight choreographer of all time.
Yuen Woo-ping became an awkward household name when he was brought in by the Wachowski Sisters to work on the Matrix movies, and when he dazzled the world with the fights in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but to those of us who had been watching wuxia movies back in the day, we already knew his hallowed name, in that he choreographed the fights in hundreds of films, whether good or bad, which we’d watched on poorly dubbed video cassettes, in the decades prior.
And the further thing is he has directed many flicks, and most of them are not great, because directing films is not his forte. Choreographing fights? Well, nobody does it better.
Plus, he’s an old man now. He was born in 1945 for crying out loud. Let him rest. He appears at the very end of the film, in period dress, telling some other old coots that this fighting stuff? He’s going to leave it to the young people to do now; they’ve got the energy for it. It was, for me, if he retires after this, a sweet moment where he passes the torch to the young ‘uns right in front of our eyes.
As for the film itself, well, if you’re a fan of old school wuxia martial arts type flicks, this will most likely be catnip for you. Endlessly familiar. Surprisingly well done. Stunningly choreographed, hammily actored, very well shot, and ‘enhanced’ by a lot of digital effects so as to not kill too many stunt people (not like in the olden days, harrumph!).
It’s big, it’s epic, it’s pure cheese in parts, it rarely strays from the templates we absorbed in the past, but it has enough changes to make it seem not so sclerotic, not so hidebound as many of the flicks of yesteryear. Even if the grim hand of the CCP censors can still be felt throughout, it almost feels like a flick that’s sneaking some modern sensibility through into an ancient formula.
I’m no expert on anything to do with China, but I do know this: the Chinese Communist Party, the entity that has been in power for 80 or so years, is endlessly paranoid and endlessly dissatisfied with the people it rules with an iron fist. The powers that be grew uncomfortable with the consumption of Japanese pop culture by Chinese citizens, whether in the form of manga or anime. Thus the brainiacs of the Party decided to promote, at all costs, Chinese versions of these media, in the form of manhua (Chinese language comics) and donghua (Chinese language animated series). It’s one part paranoia (the fear of foreign thoughts infecting the one party body politic) and one part cultural chauvinism / pride “We have no need for foreign entertainments!”
So it may be set during the Sui Dynasty, and star at least 300 Chinese actors and singers, but it’s very much in a different style and register than the usual “heroic bloodshed” epics of the Hong Kongian past, with the intention of forcibly diverting Chinese eyeballs away from Japan, the West, anywhere or anything that might give them troublesome thoughts about political reform or personal freedoms or increase their dissatisfaction with their daily lot in life.
Am I saying that this flick solely exists as yet another attempt to placate / manipulate the Mainland Mandarin speaking masses? I’m not not saying that, but then we risk falling headlong into the argument about whether any movie or artistic expression exists solely to promote some system or ideology, whether it’s to preserve the status quo or pretend to rebel against it.
One could think that there would be some importance, or danger (to the makers), in a plot where one person is being hunted by every bandit, soldier and mercenary available because he’s promoting an ideology whereby the emperor should be overthrown and the “land” should be given to “the people” might be contentious, but when you realise (with an accompanying sinking feeling) that this elusive mystery person Zhishilang (Sun Yizhuo) is merely parroting proto-CCP Maoist boilerplate, you see why the censors nodded their heads and thought “this will pacify those fools, no risks here.”
Look, I’m not going to squander what little time we have left on the planet railing about the nationalistic content of Chinese flicks: that ship sailed decades ago when Zhang Yimou, one of the greatest directors of all time, started making straight out propagandistic flicks like the visually stunning (and somewhat morally bankrupt) Hero because he wasn’t going to get work otherwise.
What I am going to do is say whether watching this flick was an enjoyable experience. Yes, yes it was, for me. There are too many characters to go through. There are so, so many characters that think they’re really important. There’s an entire subplot which derails the flick at about the ¾ mark which then wrests control of the whole endeavour and becomes the main plot, and it’s one of my least favourite plot twists (I call it “doing a Fury Road”, where the characters you were watching fleeing from / moving towards a destination for most of a flick decide fuck it and go back to where they started from).
Even Jet Li is in this film, and he’s not even a major character, and though he gets one fairly brutally glorious fight, he gets dispatched fifteen minutes in. That’s how big of a deal this flick is.
And yet what is it really? It’s a retread of that most Japanese of stories, which is Lone Wolf and Cub. Charming ex-something Dao Ma (Wu Jing) and a kid Xiao Qi (Ju Qianlang) wander around as bounty hunters, hunting bounties. For whatever reason, they mostly hang out in the dustier parts of China pursuing people who the authorities want caught, usually Dead more than Alive. Helpful posters inform people of who’s hot and who’s not, which is appreciated.
In the process of trying to secure a bounty (something which goes horribly, graphically wrong, limbs get lopped off, we feel sad because Jet Li is playing a villain etc etc) Dao Ma is guilted into taking the Most Wanted Criminal in the whole of the Middle Kingdom to Some Place. It won’t be easy, and I’m sure they’ll run into many colourful characters along the way, but in the end everyone will do the right thing or the wrong thing, and good will prevail, and the baddies will cop it in the neck, and we’ll be hellishly entertained by the time the end credits roll and a sequel is heavily implied.
The action is great, the bits between the action maybe not so great, but I can appreciate this maximalist approach. It’s no Lawrence of Arabia, but the fights are stunning and bone crunching in all their glory, though I do notice that editing is choppier these days; sequences don’t have as many consecutive movements before the cut. It’s more bursts of energy rather than a dance routine, which I miss (a bit).
Dao Ma shoulders the burden roguishly the whole way through, whether he’s chopping people’s heads off in very stylish fashion, or consoling someone about how they’ll still get through despite the fact that thousands of people are after them.
If I had a favourite fight it was certainly not the one in the middle of a sand storm / tornado, though that looked pretty impressive. And it wouldn’t be the climactic fight, which, due to the overstuffed story and overabundant characters feels like it comes out of nowhere and doesn’t feel like the emotional climax of the flick even if it neatly ties off one of the many subplots.
The funniest part of the flick for me (the actual funniest parts generally include anything said by a prisoner chained up by the mysterious Shu (the subtitles call him the Jade Faced Ghost, but every movie site calls him Shu), who seems too malevolent to be a good guy, but ambiguous enough to not be a complete baddie. He acts like he isn’t aware that Dao Ma is the main character, and he seems like he’s lifted straight out of Japanese jidaigeki anime (like Ninja Scroll or Rurouni Kenshin), and is probably played seductively by some Korean pop star. He looks evil and hot, which is what audiences want.
I’m not joking: there are some Korean pop stars in this flick. I guess there are so many roles that everyone can be accommodated. I however didn’t get a role, but that’s okay I’m sure I’ll get my 15 milliseconds of fame in the next one.
Blades of the Guardians doesn’t do anything new, but it reminds us that the old stuff is still pretty grand. Yes this is nostalgia bait, and today I’m going to indulge in it. What can I say? It’s freezing cold in the middle of winter, all I want is to huddle up on the couch with a blanket, a hot mug of whisky and a wuxia epic where 435 or so baddies get their heads lopped off in a stylish manner.
7 times Yuen Woo-ping’s best movie as director is still Iron Monkey out of 10
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“So, I’ve heard about a mysterious old bounty hunter. For him, everything has a price.” - Blades of the Guardians
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