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 umor has it that the original cut for Tsui
Hark's wuxia epic "Seven Swords" originally ran over four hours,
before it was trimmed down to 2 hours and 30 minutes for cinematic
consumption. "Seven Swords" is, in many respects, a remake of Akira
Kurosawa's famed "Seven
Samurai", wherein swordslingers with nothing to lose are
recruited to defend a village against bandits. Four of the swordsmen
come from the aptly named Mt. Heaven, where a master swordsmith has
endowed his four disciples (Leon Lai, Donnie Yen, Duncan Chow, and
Liwu Dai) with four powerful swords with which to do battle. The
remaining three consists of villagers Yuan Yin (Charlie Yeung) and
Zhi Ban (Lu Yi), and former Imperial executioner Fu Qing Ju (Lau
Kar-Leung).
Set in the down and dirty 17th
century, "Seven Swords" is far removed from the palaces and cities
of Ang Lee's "Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon" or the colorful jungle and prose of Zhang
Yimou's "House
of Flying Daggers" and "Hero".
The premise of Hark's film is that the new ruling Ching Dynasty has
outlawed martial arts, and anyone caught practicing the discipline
is to be executed. Taking advantage of this new law is the bellicose
Fire-wind (Honglei Sun), who has assembled his own private army to
clear out the martial artists in the land for blood bounty. His
latest target is Martial Village, of which many are practitioners of
martial arts.
With action choreography by Donnie Yen and the
legendary Lau Kar-Leung, there are, justifiably, huge expectations
for the action in "Seven Swords". The fights are fast and furious,
and the bodycount massive. The results of the combat is of the red
meat variety -- gallons of blood, decapitations, severed limbs, and
people dying by the bunches. Of the film's five or so fights (three
involving the seven swordsmen), the intricately choreographed battle
between Chu Zhao Nan (Yen) and Fire-wind within the confines of a
narrow corridor marks the film's highlight. Curiously, although
"Seven Swords" has been touted as more "real" and "gritty" than the
recent spate of wuxia, it nevertheless uses a lot of obvious
wireworks. Also, it's humorous to imagine real people in 17th
century China wielding such lumbering weapons as those featured in
the film.
Although the action is excellent when it
arrives, there are long periods where nothing happens except
characters suddenly falling in love and wandering about the
landscape for long periods doing nothing. For an action film, "Seven
Swords" is not all that action-pack, with just three (or perhaps
four) battles in the first two hours. In the second half, we're
forced to sit through almost an hour of plot machinations. Of course
this wouldn't be so bad if the story was at least half interesting.
The abundant characters and their little insignificant love affairs,
love glances, and love triangles bog the film down in mostly asinine
melodrama. Of particular pointlessness is Chu Zhao Nan's
preoccupation with a whimpering Korean love slave that takes a good
30 minutes of screentime.
Of the cast, Donnie Yen is most imposing as Chu
Zhao Nan, a no-nonsense killer with long, unkempt hair. We don't
even see Chu's face for much of the film, and the only time his
sword ever comes unsheathe is when it's ready to deliver the killing
blow, which it does with amazing efficiency. Unfortunately Leon Lai,
Charlie Yeung, and the rest of the cast get lost in the muddled
story and convoluted emotions. Yeung's character does provide some
unexpected comic relief via her tricked out sword, while Lai barely
registers as a viable personality. One is hardpressed to understand
why he was even cast; the character simply has no depth, wandering
about the screen like an automaton for much of the film.
The film's aesthetics is overwhelmingly brown,
bland, and drab, which makes sense considering the hard desert
terrain on display. Martial Village looks like one giant hole in the
ground, with houses built along the outer edges. And although it
encumbers itself with one too many side plots, characters, and some
questionable non-linear narrative, "Seven Swords" is very
straightforward. After the initial encounters at the village,
followed by a raid on bad guy Fire-wind's desert castle, the seven
swordsmen decides to move the villagers, before finally taking
shelter underground. The film then pulls out an ace and threatens to
torpedo the film's entire premise (saving the villagers) by
revealing a traitor who goes on a murderous rampage.
Other nitpicks involve
the villagers, who despite being mostly martial artists, are barely
able to stand up to Fire-wind's marauders. The villains may dress up
in "The
Road Warrior"-style gear and paint their faces like wrestlers
from the WWE, but the way they fall to the seven swordsmen would
seem to indicate they're more style than substance. As the villain,
Honglei Sun has the right combination of perversity and madness, but
more interesting is his only henchwoman, who sports a haircut that
would make Mister T. proud. It should also be noted that the film's
score is Godawful, approaching the kind of quality you'd hear being
produced by a High School marching band; that is, if all the
musicians in said band were tone deaf, and the conductor himself a
deaf mute.
If "Seven Swords" is any indication, Tsui Hark
has not yet returned to form. The film is a mild improvement over
the excesses of "Legend
of Zu", although not by much. There is still the feeling that
Hark doesn't quite understand narrative logic, or perhaps he's
working under a completely different set of rules, and refuses to
let us in on it. Despite being over 2 hours, "Seven Swords" feels
very much like a film that was cut down from an original 4-hour
running time. But while the extra hours would probably plug some of
the film's plot holes, I doubt that the excised footages were more
than exposition and character scenes, for the simple reason that you
don't cut out action in an action movie. As such, adding the extra
hour and a half back in will simply make "Seven Swords" twice as
unwieldy as it already is, so maybe the cutting room is where they
belong after all.
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