It’s visionary film maker Tsui Hark’s turn to remake Seven Samurai, this time in a feudal Chinese setting in keeping to the post-modern resurgence of the Wuxia epic, but Ben Johnson finds the whole thing a bit of an empty spectacle.
Seven Swords
Distributor: Contender Entertainment Group Format: Region 2 (PAL), 2-disc box set Length: 135 min. Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 2.35:1 Audio: Mandarin Subtitles: English Extras: Promotional Gallery - UK theatrical trailer, theatrical teaser and theatrical TV spot, Hong Kong theatrical trailers, international press. Interview Galleries - Gallery 1: interviews with director Tsui Hark and stars Donnie Yen, Lau Kar-leung and Leon Lai. Gallery 2: interviews with stars Duncan Chow, Charlie Young, Tai Li-wu and Lu Yi. Gallery 3: interviews with stars Kim So-yeon, Zhang Jing-chu and Sun Hong-lei. Forging The Sword - The Making Of Seven Swords featurette including shooting diaries and production sketches. UK Version Deleted Scenes - Heaven's Fall Sees Too Much, Searching The Desert, Conflict Underground, A Darker Plot, A Longer Struggle, Original Ending. Original Version Deleted Scenes - The Seventh Sword, A Defiant Village, Refusal To Sing, Love Triangle. Sound: DTS, Dolby Digital 5.1
Year of Release: 2005; Origin: China, Hong Kong, South Korea; Studio: Film Workshop, Mandarin Films
Director: Tsui Hark; Producer: Tsui Hark, Lee Joo-ick, Ma Zhong-jun, Pan Zhi-zhong; Script: Tsui Hark, Cheung Chi-sing, Chun Tin-nam; Action Director: Lau Kar-leung, Stephen Tung Wei, Hung Yan-yan; Cast Leon Lai Ming, Donnie Yen Chi-tan, Charlie Yeung Choi-nei, Kim So-yeon, Duncan Lai Kan, Sun Hong-lei, Lau Kar-leung, Lu Yi, Tai Li-wu, Michael Wong Man-tak.
Alternative Titles: N/A
Trailer: Click below to view the trailer for Seven Swords
Plot Synopsis
17th Century China, and the Ching usurpation is in full flow, the Emperor’s Imperial Guard administering the Government’s latest decree that all martial arts practitioners should be slain to quash the threat of future upheaval. They’re a nasty looking bunch, like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse: heavily clad with impenetrable armour, swanky weaponry (chains and shields with disposable blades) and Goth-painted faces. Their leader is Fire-Wind (Sun Hong-lei), an ex-Ming patriot now Manchu renegade in search of riches under the new regime, who administers sadistic punishment even to his own guards, and is so evil that he laughs at everything. His band of violent dissidents set to work culling entire villages, slaying martial fighters, raping and pillaging, the works.
Fu Qing Ju (Lau Kar-leung), a retired assassin and ex-associate of Fire-Wind, fends off the Imperial Guard at a wedding reception and returns to his Martial Village to warn everyone of their impending doom. The inhabitants of Martial Village, unaware that twenty tonnes of bad news is heading their way, decide to ignore the ex-rebel Fu Qing Ju, leaving him to make a calculated escape with local villagers Wu (Charlie Yeung) and Han (Lu Yi). They travel to the snowy peaks of Mount Heaven, to meet ‘the Master’, who enlists the help of the ‘Seven Swords’ – a ragged, peasant looking clan of sword wielding hippies, each battling their own inner demons. Their swords match their personalities, apparently – there’s Chu (Donnie Yen), an ex-slave from Korea; Yang (Leon Lai), who’s ‘arrogant’ sword is only half finished; and Mulang (Duncan Lai) and Xin (Tai Li-wu), who are both fabulously acrobatic. Wu and Han are made fifth and sixth Swords in a bizarre sequence where a meteorite falls to earth and unleashes the power of the Transience Sword, entombed in rock. Fu grabs his blade to make up the seven.
They make it back to Martial Village just in time to rescue the common folk from being ripped apart. With Fire-Wind on the defensive, the Seven Swords raid his desert hideout and reclaim his prized possession, Green Pearl (Kim So-yeon), a Korean-born slave girl who Chu takes a shine too, only for the rest of the village to point her out as a traitor. On the run, the villagers hide in the Northwest caves of China’s luscious foothills to help stoke out the rat. Meanwhile, Chu has the bright idea of leaving their confines and blowing up Fire-Wind’s secret stash of treasure, only to have himself kidnapped in the process and his Green Pearl sliced up in a schoolboy misunderstanding. This sets the scene for complete bloody carnage, as the Seven Swords swallow their inadequacies and take on Fire-Wind once and for all, storming his sandy hideaway and confronting the bald freak in a climactic fight to the death. Fire-Wind is left to Chu to sort out in a wonderfully imaginative duel in the narrow confines of a cramped walkway.
Review
Released in the west hot on the heels of wuxia epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Tsui Hark – the former king of the Hong Kong epic – proves that, recently, he hasn’t been paying enough attention. Seven Swords, based on the work of Liang Yu-shen, is a bit of mess – a four-hour TV movie condensed into two cinematic hours with little scope for continuity and coherency, which is perhaps a testament to the foreign producers rather than the auteur director, who rushed to have the film ready to open the Venice Film Festival in 2005 at the expense of a decent editing job. The story bounds and charges, in places making very little sense, carried on a multitude of brilliant fight sequences staged by Shaw Brothers legend Lau Kar-leung. The action is hot stuff, and the ensemble cast is adequately skilled, but this is an altogether empty film, devoid of motivation in the face of a great sense of style.
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