TV Entertainment News

Film review: The Warlords

Three massive Asian stars team up for this Chinese hero epic - Andy Lau, Jet Li and Takeshi Kaneshiro - but even their combined charisma can't lift its heavy weather.

Directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan, the film is a speculative reimagining of an unsolved crime in 19th-century Chinese history: in 1870, a regional governor was assassinated and the culprit never found. Chan portrays this man as a soldier and bandit named Pang, played by Jet Li. Originally, he was a lowly footsoldier who survives a massacre by pretending to be dead on the field of battle. He then rises relentlessly to be a leader of men, making common cause with two other warriors, Jiang (Kaneshiro) and Zhao (Lau).

Chan finally sees Pang's death as a result of male pride and romantic matters of the heart: each of the three has a connection with the same beautiful woman, Lian (Xu Jinglei). As so often with this sort of material, I found the battle scenes beautifully shot, but strangely uninvolving, and the narrative is cumbersome and overlong.