Tau ming chong

Last night I had the opportunity to view one of the best films i've seen in a very long time. One that stays with you far after the closing credits. One that requires time after viewing to untie all the knots in your stomach.

Peter Chan's "The Warlords" is a period epic in every sense of the word. Chan covers a lot of ground here depicting war and the consequences thereof consisting of his anti-war sentiments. It tells the story of three "brothers" played brilliantly by Jet Li (Fearless), Andy Lau (Infernal Affairs) and Takeshi Kaneshiro (House Of Flying Daggers) who make a pact of brotherhood to one another that consists of killing anyone who harms one of the brothers and killing any brother who harms another brother as they lead an army through war after war taking over city after city.

It's incredible to watch the thought process of making vital decisions during a battle or within their own army to defy humanity for the "greater good". It shows the internal and external struggle of these decisions by opposing points of view. The emotions felt by these men translate in any language and leave you emotionally drained after watching the film through to its tragic end.

The cinematography is outstanding, the budget is huge, the directing brilliant and the war scenes brutal as can be. We're talking decapitations, gushing blood, limbs sliced off and a man being blown up by a cannonball. Chan is delivering a truth in the brutality of war rather than dressing it up to keep (most of it) realistic.

War is hell.... and this film will take you there and back. Highest recommendation.

In "The Warlords," another rendition of the classic Chinese tale of loyalty and betrayal of three brothers, we see evidence of something many may not realize: when not hampered by his horrible accent, Jet Li can act, in fact, for this role he received an Asian Film Award nomination for Best Actor. He may not be a Deniro or a Denzel, but he's at least got that certain intensity that makes Clint Eastwood. We do not, however, get to see what American audiences know Li for, his martial arts prowess. As winner of the Hong Kong Film Awards both for best film and best director, Peter Chan ("The Eye," 1 through infinity it seems), we see here an exemplary piece of cinema which demonstrates the high quality of movies coming from China today. The cinematography is well done, costumes are excellent, epic battle sequences are choreographed beautifully and the characters and complex character relationships are well developed, sincere and sympathetic. In addition to Li, we see moving performances by Andy Lau, a winner of numerous Asian film awards, and Takeshi Kaneshiro, both who Americans may know from "The House of Flying Daggers." If you are looking for a "Jet Li movie" you may likely find yourself bored. Despite the war background of this movie it is, at heart, a drama, and a very good one at that.

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Looking at the list of writers involved in this project, it is a fraking miracle that this film is as good as it is. While it is no The Banquet, it is a solid historical epic which features the most layered and complex performance of Jet Li's career.

Loosely based on the Shaw Brothers' 1973 film The Blood Brothers as well as the life and death of General Ma Xinyi, this is a tragedy in the Greek or Shakespearean sense. Jet Li plays General Pang Qingyun, a general of the Ching army whose command is slaughtered by the Taiping rebels while Pang's allies the Ho Army watch and do nothing.

Injured, delirious and with no one left to command, Pang is nursed back to health by a beautiful woman who turns out to be the wife of Andy Lau's bandit leader Zhao Er-Hu. When the Ho Army raids Lau's village, steals their supplies and kills one of his men, Jet Li convinces Er-Hu and his lieutenant Zhang Wen-Xiang (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) that if they join the Ching Army they will get the respect, money and guns necessary to protect themselves and their village. Pang, Er-Hu and Zhang swear a blood oath to stand together with death as the penalty for oath-breakers.

This starts Pang on his quest to save his country from itself, building an army from the unwanted, the poor, the brigands. In the process, Pang must fight Imperial politics as much as the enemy Taiping rebels. Each step along the way, Pang has to barter away a little piece of his soul to achieve victory, with Zhang reacting with hero-worshipping approval, while Er-Hu becomes increasingly disgusted.

The down side to working with a star of Jet Li's caliber is that in every role he is Jet Li, bringing with it his quiet heroism and idealism. This film turns that drawback into an advantage by casting Jet Li as a man who does increasingly villainous things for the purest of motives. Like a Chinese Robespierre, Pang is trying to build a free, united China on a pyramid of corpses.

The film that The Warlords reminds me of the most is John Ford's The Searchers.

Like The Searchers, The Warlords starts with a massacre. Both films feature characters who leave their homes on an obsessive quest that seems impossible and takes them years to complete.

John Ford uses John Wayne's iconic, heroic status and subverts it, as the obsessive quest slowly destroys Wayne from within. Jet Li's character in The Warlords follows the same arc, beginning his quest with idealistic purity and finishing just inches from total madness. Both men succeed in their quests, Jet Li's Pang in saving his country, Wayne's Ethan Edwards in rescuing his niece, but in both cases their quest is ultimately futile, because what they saved was the reality and what they wanted to save was an ideal. Both men end their films framed in a doorway that they can no longer cross, because their journeys have turned them into men of war who have no place in the world of peace on the other side of the doorway.

For an international film that came out in 2007, this has to be one of the best cinematographic films I've seen in a while. It felt like it was Hollywood produced and filmed in 4K. Directing was spot-on, and all casting was excellent, including the massive amount of extras. My only issues is the writing; this Chinese historical drama was full of sweeping montages, dramatic battle scenes and rhetorical blood oaths, but its dramatic gravitas was lost amongst a convoluted plot and a very weak love triangle. Nevertheless, it was gratifying and entertaining. A solid 8/10 from me, the majority of my rating for the cinematography.

From the Warring States Period going all the way back to the 5th century BC, wars have wracked China seemingly without pause. During the second half of the 19th century, and the late Qing/Ching/Manchu dynasty, some 50 million soldiers, bandits, and civilians died in the endless conflict.

Watching "Warlords," screened for the first time in North America Saturday night in the Castro Theater, part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, at times one might have thought that most of those casualties are shown - often in close-ups - in the film.

Beginning with a view reminiscent of the Normandy invasion sequence of "Saving Private Ryan," the film by Peter Chan and Wai Man Yip depicts combat vividly and intensely. Chung Man Yee's production design peaks at times in virtually unprecedented battle-field spectacles.

There is no resolution, no peace, and only a quasi-relevant love story (featuring Jinglei Xu), but "Warlords" goes well beyond just fightin' and killin' and dyin'. Right from the beginning, as Jet Li's General Pang picks himself up from under the bodies of his dead soldiers, you notice two things: Jet Li's complete lack of vanity and the ability of this martial-arts star to act convincingly and well.

The Manchu style of the head shaved in front and the hair gathered in a ponytail in the back looks hideous when it's all messed up, especially with blood. Jet Li not only appears half dead in his first appearance, but he is taking a bad-hair day to its absolute worst. And then, you also notice that Famous Jet Li - who is NOT flying through the air in this film - has been replaced by an honest and talented actor who brings to life a complex, conflicted, tragic character.

With shifting alliances, goals, and always at the edge of extinction, Pang and his two "blood brothers," Takeshi Kaneshiro's soulful Jiang Wuyang and Andy Lau's towering Zhao Erhu (perhaps Lau's best-ever performance), struggle from small-time wars all the way to the taking of Nanking on behalf of the fast-fading central (so to speak) government in Beijing. The same history-based story has been told, in more modest terms, in Zhang Che's 1973 "The Blood Brothers." A historical war film, a brutal but not gratuitously violent drama, "Warlords" impresses, even stuns, but in the end fails to provide catharsis or even an attempt to make sense of the senseless - something Zhang Yimou came close to in "Hero" (also with Jet Li, playing a similar historic character).