As The Guillotines opens, director Andrew Lau wastes no time in introducing audiences to his title characters with a furious display of action. Entering battle amid flames and flying blades are seven members of the Guillotines, a secret Qing dynasty death squad specially raised to carry out the emperor’s orders and skilled at using the flying guillotine to take out targets. Their adversary this night is Wolf (Huang Xiaoming), a Han prophet whose community of followers, known as the Herders, is seen as a grave threat by the Manchu emperor Qianlong (Wen Zhang).
The Guillotines are on orders to seize Wolf alive, and for now all goes to plan. But when Wolf’s execution day arrives, he makes a dramatic escape and female Guillotine Musen vanishes too. In response, the Guillotines’ commander (Jimmy Wang) dispatches six warriors to take revenge and bring back his daughter Musen’s body, on the assumption that she’s dead. But accompanying the six is Haidu (Shawn Yue), an imperial guard who has plans for the Guillotines that could turn this mission into their last.
By this point fans of earlier movies with the Guillotines’ signature weapon – see the Shaw Brothers classic The Flying Guillotine (1974) and the nutty tournament flick Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976), among others – may find themselves surprised by the direction Lau and his writing team have taken with this picture. The weapon makes limited appearances after the opening sequence and, while action scenes certainly don’t stop there, the story as a whole moves in unexpected and ambitious directions. The Guillotines, it turns out, are seen in some quarters of the Qing regime as a dirty secret that needs phasing out – a development that essentially leaves the group of assassins on their own and away from the system that raised them to be solely focused on the job.
Meanwhile, the character of Wolf and the world surrounding him introduce quasi-religious themes and bring in a Han population persecuted by the ruling Manchus. There’s no mistaking Wolf’s look – bearded and clad in robes – as being Jesus-like, and biblical imagery turns up repeatedly in scenes of him and the Herders. Backstory for Haidu and the Guillotines’ field commander Leng (Ethan Ruan) meanwhile reinforce the picture’s themes of brotherhood, loyalty and betrayal – topics that, along with the end-credits music, offer connection with Lau’s 1996 triad film Young and Dangerous – and there’s even a message on harmony and nation-building to close the story.
Just as the script does, Lau’s direction likewise departs from the period epic norm with a surprise or two. More conventional army scenes make an appearance toward the end, but before that the action sequences are seriously stylised affairs, featuring speed changes, explosions, smouldering glares and a curiously high-tech take on the flying guillotine. Lau also peppers the film with shocks of extreme violence, such as when Wolf wants to make a captured Guillotine know how it feels to be bullied. Locations meanwhile vary from the darkened halls of the Beijing palace and the Guillotines’ headquarters to spectacular mountain ranges and lush fields, all shot with smoothly roving camerawork. Among the players, Wen Zhang and Jimmy Wang give accomplished performances that are all too brief, Chris Lee capably handles a major role transformation, and Ethan Ruan and Shawn Yue tackle complex, brooding characters. The main attention grabber, however, is Huang Xiaoming, who makes his presence felt with what is, quite simply, one of the most unusual and distinctive protagonists to grace Hong Kong screens in recent years.