The Warlords

One of the many things I’ve learned spending an unhealthy amount of time in front of my tv watching movies, is that the folks in the Orient are pretty good at making epic flicks. When I watch films such as Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower I find myself in awe at the ingenius integration of colour, poetry and action as a single seemless story telling device. People can get weirded out all they want at the notion of people flying through the trees in a desperate attempt to gut each other like fish, but if you want to see the cutting edge of non CGI special effects and cinematography, go East.

Ever since those aforementioned groundbreaking movies, I have lept at the opportunity to take home just about any movie that even looks vaguely similar. In so doing, some patterns are starting to emerge. What Brooklyn’s Finest is to police dramas, the Warlords is to Chinese war movies. It seems like every movie of the last 2 or 3 years getting released to dvd here involves a variation of the same fucking theme: China, a nation divided, powerful armies mass against each other for slaughter and treasure, but from the chaos a hero emerges whose ultimate victory/defeat is the unification of his people. They eat that shit up over there apparently.

Jet Li stars as a general who keeps getting fucked over by tenuous alliances between douchebag politicians and even douchier generals. When we first meet his character, he is the sole survivor of a battle that saw every single soldier under his command killed while his reinforcements just chilled off in the distance. As he aimlessly wanders the countryside, he stumbles across a strange chick who feeds him what looks like dirty bathwater from an ashtray looking dish and spends the night with him to make sure he lives. In the morning, she’s gone and he isn’t sure if he imagined the whole thing.

Before long, a marauding band of rebels come along recruiting the poor with food they stole from the army that had abandoned him. Being Jet Li, he shows some killer kung fu which piques the interest of the head dude. But see, there’s a conundrum, Jet Li is clearly an army man, and these dudes kill army dudes. They can’t be brothers can they? Well, when the army catches wind of who stole their shit and comes back for some ass kicking, Jet Li has a solution. Join the rival army under his leadership, they can feed their families and stop getting the shit they stole stolen back. So head dude from earlier, his fellow even headier dude, and Jet Li swear a blood oath to become brothers and set out to get some dignity by making Jet’s quest for peace and unification come to fruition.

There are some pretty epic battles, twists and turns, romantic entanglements and some kung fu, but in the end, the Warlords is what you get when you mix Braveheart with the Departed and set it in China, only not as good. Li is looking old but is still fierce as fuck, and he seems more relaxed when he’s able to speak his own language instead of mangling English. They were able to avoid a lot of the standard shots I’ve come to expect in these movies (i.e. the love affair with a sky full of flying arrows) but overall, this is not up to the standard set by Red Cliff, Hero or House of Flying Daggers.

I rate this 6 out of 10