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Jade Warrior, or Jadesoturi, is not a full-fledged martial arts film. The cover of the DVD may lead you to believe otherwise but I assure you, there are three major fights in the film and a number of smaller scuffles, and none of them would qualify the film as a “cross-cultural martial arts epic.” On the other hand, Jade Warrior, a Chinese-Finnish production budgeted at $3.5 million, is a film that requires and rewards patience. A perplexing, sometimes downright confusing take on two distinct mythologies, the film works best as a Finnish reworking of Chinese Wuxia themes. This is a martial arts art film, far from the high-flying action of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and closest in spirit to the second reel of Jet Li starrer Fearless. As it is, the film is a pleasant surprise, a mature, professional production that rises well above many shoestring, brainless martial arts would-be epics.

TORONTO -- A millennia-spanning martial arts epic, fusing folk legends from China and (of all places) Finland, Jade Warrior certainly has a curiosity factor going for it as it steps into the swordplay-and-wire-fu arena. The hybrid is less exotic on screen than on paper, though, unspooling in an overserious muddle that won't have broad appeal in the U.S. market, though one can imagine it appealing to Finnish audiences hungry for their own genre blockbuster.

Bouncing between 2000 B.C. and the present day, the story involves three eternally reincarnated characters and the magic box they seek to control. Made by a master blacksmith using way-ahead-of-his-time technology, the box is a machine designed to produce "happiness and welfare" for a whole society. Inexplicably, its maker never turned the thing on.

Instead he entrusted it to Sintai, "the son of the smith," decreeing that it be opened "only when most needed." Four thousand years and a few fairly nasty wars later, things evidently haven't gotten bad enough.

Playing Sintai and his modern counterpart Kai, Tommi Eronen employs a special talent for looking dumbstruck. Kai doesn't know about his past lives, and cares more about reuniting with his girlfriend Ronja than about the fantastic tale a stranger (a junk dealer who came across the artifact and recognized its significance) is telling him.

A good deal of exposition time is given to spelling out a sketchy mythology about an apocalypse-bent patriarch and his brood of sons bearing names like Death and Fear. There's something about a final, unnamed son, hinting at secret identities and revelations to come, but things are confusing enough already. Back in 2000 B.C., Sintai and his comrade at arms are in love with the same woman, and both use the same seduction technique: a hybrid between dance and hand-to-hand combat that may sound sexy but looks pretty silly onscreen.

In between turgid metallurgical metaphors about the shape of the cosmos, Warrior offers some cliched hyper-dramatic standoffs and slow-mo acrobatics. The action isn't nearly sufficient to carry all the mumbo-jumbo, and the cast doesn't have enough charisma to keep the script afloat on their own. Director and co-writer Antti-Jussi Annila sets up a couple of Zhang Yimou-emulating CGI shots -- one where action kicks up a whirlpool of dried leaves, another with Kai pounding on an anvil as glowing embers storm around him -- that try awfully hard but fail to generate an emotional reaction. By the end, it's a little hard to figure out whether the hero got what he wanted or not -- and harder still to care.

JADE WARRIOR (JADE SOTURI)

No U.S. Distributor

Blind Spot Pictures

Credits: '

Director: Antti-Jussi Annila

Writers: Antti-Jussi Annila, Petri Jokiranta, based on the story by Iiro Kuttner

Producers: Petri Jokiranta, Tero Kaukomaa

Executive producers: Peter Loehr, San Fu Maltha, Margus Ounapuu

Director of photography: Henri Blomberg

Production designer: Jukka Uusitalo

Costumes: Anna Vilppunen

Music: Kimmo Pohjonen, Samuli Kosminen

Editor: Iikka Hesse.

Cast: Kai/Sintai: Tommi Eronen

Berg: Markku Peltola

Pin Yu: Zhang Jing-chu

Ronja: Krista Kosonen

No MPAA rating

Running time -- 102 minutes...

TORONTO -- The Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled a new sidebar, dubbed Vanguard, that aims to help the launch of indie movies that push sexual and cultural boundaries. The inaugural Vanguard program will include a world premiere for Australian filmmaker Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth, a contemporary take on the classic William Shakespeare play that features gangland warfare and a drug-addled Lady Macbeth. The sidebar also has booked world premieres for the erotically charged murder-mystery Chacun Sa Nuit, from French filmmakers Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr, and Jade Warrior, a martial arts epic traversing ancient China and modern-day Finland from Finnish director Antti-Jussi Annila.