Hong Kong filmmakers Alan Mak and Felix Chong, best known for their work on the Internal Affairs crime trilogy, make their first foray into mainland China’s high-budget period epics with The Lost Bladesman. The source material is the story of Guan Yu, a major historical figure whose exploits were portrayed in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and who went on to become deified and is widely worshipped today.
As the Han dynasty comes to an end amid civil war, forces loyal to Prime Minister Cao Cao (Jiang Wen) defeat those of rival warlord Liu Bei (Alex Fong) and take hostages. Among those seized are Liu’s wives, his future concubine Qilan (Sun Li) and his sworn brother, General Guan (Donnie Yen, his character’s name rendered in full as Guan Yunchang). Guan goes on to help Cao score an important battle victory and is granted the title of marquis by the Emperor (Edison Wang), but the warrior’s loyalty cannot be bought.
A boudoir trap is later set to trick Guan into declaring his affections for Qilan and spark betrayal between him and Liu. But when that fails, Guan and Qilan escape and head to where Liu is carrying on in battle. But the journey isn’t an easy one: orders are sent for generals to kill them, and Guan, who’s getting pretty fed up with seemingly endless war, must fight his way through in hopes of eventually finding peace.
Viewers recalling John Woo’s Red Cliff and Daniel Lee’s Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (both also drawn from Romance of the Three Kingdoms) will find familiar names in The Lost Bladesman, and the figure of Guan himself may even recognisable from other, more modern Hong Kong cinema settings: statues of the bearded and red-faced Guan holding his signature weapon, a broad blade affixed to a staff, are points of worship for policemen and triads alike onscreen. And while the principal action of The Lost Bladesman focuses on just one bloody episode of Guan’s life, the filmmakers add title cards at the start and finish for those new to his story.
Like other Chinese costume epics have done before it, The Lost Bladesman opens with grand vistas of battle scenes, the set piece being the siege of a walled city. But soon the action plays out on a more intimate scale. Plotting and double-crosses develop in quiet interplay, and the top fight sequences make use of a variety of settings. Most spectacular are bruising encounters in a tight alleyway, in a dark and labyrinthine mill, and in a sparse courtyard, and the directors have fun with form by having one over-the-top massacre occur in mere seconds behind briefly closed doors.
While his co-star Jiang Wen has been riding high in the Chinese box office of late with his chart-topping Let the Bullets Fly, actor and martial-arts director Donnie Yen remains especially popular among fans of today’s top-end kung fu cinema. Here one focus of Yen’s role is on portraying righteousness and compassion, and there’s an intriguing battle of wits to follow between his character and Jiang’s.
But when it comes to the action scenes, which mount rapidly in The Lost Bladesman’s second half, Yen continues to provide the outsize displays of heroism, agility and strength — a regular one-man army of the Chinese screen — that get the masses lining up at the box office.
Tim Youngs