[Our thanks to Moko for the following review.]
There have been some fear in recent months that the current explosion of Chinese historical war epics have watered down the genre. The concern, I believe, is that any hopeful screenwriter with some highlighted history books, a few thousand extras and a couple of major Asian film stars can now roll out their own uninspired take on the period of their choice. Luckily, if there's one thing that China has a lot of (and China has a lot of MANY things), it's history. As it turns out, 5000 years of civilization offers up some pretty choice material for at least a few more surprisingly smart, morally complex films. Peter Chan's The Warlords manages that perennial hat-trick of marrying long swaths of violence to a harsh critique of the same. An unconventionally anti-war war film, Warlords refuses to be blithe about death, an interesting stance for a film that begins and ends with stabbings.
The film opens with a high-pitched and bloody battle of the Taiping Rebellion, the popular revolt that rocked China from 1850-1864, setting the forces of the Qing dynasty against a modernizing, messianic Christian uprising. This specific battle is going very poorly for the Qing army; in the corpse-strewn aftermath, we encounter Pang (Jet Li), the film's ostensible protagonist, for the first time. He is crawling out of an enormous pile of corpses, generally setting the tone for the rest of the film. Pang is- or was- a general of the Qing army, the only survivor after the rival Hui army refuses them backup, leaving them to the rebels and their giant, stabby poles. After being saved and abandoned by a mysterious woman (Xu Jinglei as Lian), Pang joins up with a gang of bandits headed by Wu Yang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Er Hu (Andy Lau), putting us right back into familiar epic territory. When the bandits are themselves robbed by the Hui, Pang takes control, becoming blood brothers with Wu Yang and Er Hu and enlisting the entire bandit army in the Qing army under his own command. Ostensibly in order to impress his superiors, Pang commits the army to a series of increasingly foolhardy battles - but his hard-line militarism (and his ongoing affair with Lian, Er Hu's wife, thus fulfilling the "doomed love affair" requirement) threatens both his friendship with his blood brothers and his soul.
Although the plot sounds somewhat standard, this is another situation where the execution really makes the film. The action is amazing in its brutality - no balletic ass-kicking to be found here, just blood and mud and endless, endless stabbings. The war itself isn't exactly noble - messianic Christianity aside, the Taiping Rebels were for land socialization and the abolition of foot-binding, which, I mean, it's not like they were trying to release Sauron or something - and the film makes a point of noting that the bandits who join up with the Qing are only doing it for three hots and a squat. While Pang talks a good game, by the time he makes his big speech explaining that he's been running people into guns for the past half-hour in the interests of freedom and equality, his soul's already gone and the audience knows it. Although the romance subplot doesn't really work - we don't know why Pang and Lian care about each other , or what their relationship consists of other than rushed sex while standing up, and it seems like it only exists to make everything more awkward - everything is well-acted, well-paced, and for the most part Warlords backs up effective action with an interesting story about honor, political efficacy and trade-offs therein.
Review by Moko