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The legendary Tsui Hark is here with his latest creation, Seven Swords, which is based on the novel Seven Swordsmen From Tian Mountain by Yusheng Liang. The movie features a largely unknown cast apart from Donnie Yen who plays Dragon Sword, and it follows the adventures of seven swordsmen as they battle against a powerful evil warlord.
The movie draws far too many parallels with Seven Samurai, and while it is apparent that there is more than one difference between the two movies, it is reasonable to claim that this is a Chinese rendition of Akira Kurosawa’s original film.
I must say, the pacing seemed to be a little off as there was a mid section that I found extremely dull and found myself fighting to stay awake. In terms of action, the movie does tick the right boxes as there are a few fight scenes here and there. However, they feel less-than-fresh. It honestly seems like Harkis stuck in time and is still at the Stage of stunts in Once Upon A Time In China, but without the help of Jet Li there to sell the move.
The narrative is flimsy at best and some sort of romance has been shoved in to enable Dragon Sword to vent a little when things inevitably end up in abysmal failure. And as if that was not problematic enough, we are subjected to other characters with strange names like Transience Sword and Monkey Peach Slapper Sword or something along those lines, I admit, I was starting to lose the desire to even attempt to care, but were given no time to develop any semblance of sympathy. Trying to put the pieces together, the audience gets bitten by the ‘try too hard’ bug where we are shown hacks of the characters’ backstories in bursts of montages while the climax is unfolding to add layers to the characters. To mark these characters as ‘one dimensional’ is giving them too much respect.
The character of the villain is fairly well brought to life, but compared to other similarly invidious characters, this one was too weak. More believable is his nightmarish, time-traveling, leather-clad aide, dubbed the Goth Chick, who at least takes charge of the armies instead of lounging around the fort and playing with women captives. He has grown so accustomed to being pampered that the aforementioned Goth Chick ought to have slapped him hard a long time back and sent him to bed without supper.
In spite of this, the film has some merit. Even if fighting scenes are rather tame, it does provide some entertainment. Besides the lack of superfluous CGI was a welcome change. Yen’s performance, as The Good Guy, is at the very least moderately aided by his natural charm. And there is one truly fantastic performance by a woman who bears an incredible resemblance to a young Maggie Cheung, unfortunately, I cannot place her as there were some technical issues at the start of the film and the credits were erased.
Seven Swords feels like the kind of movies we watched a decade back, which, while not entirely negative, is rather disappointing. It must be doing something wrong if an action movie has me fighting off sleep towards the middle part of the movie.
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