The only survivor of a slaughter brought on by the actions of a duplicitous rival, General Pang (Jet Li) wanders across war-torn China until he meets bandits Wu Yang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Er-Hu (Andy Lau). Pang convinces Wu Yang and Er-Hu to join his cause, adding their numbers to a growing effort aimed at ending once and for all the seemingly endless civil war that has ripped the country apart. But infighting, clashing ideals, and a long-simmering romance between Pang and Lian (Xu Jiglei), Er-Hu’s wife, threaten to destroy the fragile alliance.

CRITIQUE

The Warlords would have been a disappointment in any year, but the fact that is serves as an also-ran when viewed against John Woo’s Red Cliff makes its squandered potential and missed opportunities all the more evident. This movie features three of China’s top stars, and was bolstered by a budget that makes those of similar offerings look like chicken feed, but the script is tired, rambling, and clichéd. About a third of the movie is enjoyable to watch, but the rest is often a torture test.

Director Peter Ho-Sun Chan is best known for helming romantic dramas, and if you imagine what kind of end product you’d get from someone making the switch from romantic drama to historical-war epic, you might be able to envision what sort of problems The Warlords has.

The movie is meant to be big--big in terms of scale, character, story, and tone. But aside from the scale, what’s meant to be big here is often overripe and melodramatic, the cinematic equivalent of purple prose. Were it handled correctly, the bickering, infighting, and jostling for power among the three warriors would be more than enough to support the movie’s plot, but here it’s played in a rote manner (especially toward the end, which gets particularly overwrought).

It’s also given short shrift in favor of playing up the romantic triangle, which is a truly bad idea, as it’s here the movie really runs itself aground, turning into a silly soap opera. For example, Wu Yang first catches wind of Pang and Lian’s relationship when he sees Pang throwing longing looks her way. That’s a bit lazy, but I’ll cut Chan and his writers (all four of them) some slack. But what really makes this scene silly is that fact that it takes place in a trench outside the city of Suzhou, to which Pang and the others have laid siege for the better part of a year. Lian’s presence here is never explained (or if it was, it was so poorly handled I missed it); she apparently just rides up one day, having traveled hundred of miles across a country plagued by both war and robber barons, not receiving so much as a scratch in the process. That’s a bit much; worse still, this incident really has little impact on the plot, as it’s immediately shoved aside and ignored.

As I mentioned, Pang and the others spend a year outside Suzhou, but you’d never know it. The period of time covered by the movie is roughly a decade, but it seems like little more than three or four weeks; the passage of time is simply never conveyed. At one point Pang, Wu Yang, and Er-Hu go into battle and then immediately return home, the sequence playing out over fifteen or twenty minutes; subsequent dialogue indicates the campaign took about four years, which was certainly news to me. And the ultimate resolution of the Suzhou siege occurs when the city’s ruling official decides that his own death is the only way to end the conflict, so he allows himself to fall in combat against Er-Hu, who’d earlier sneaked into the city and taken the guise of an opium merchant.

Again, this is all covered in dialogue; it’s never explained exactly how Er-Hu managed to sneak in or how he managed to adopt his new identity, nor do we know how much time all of this required. This is just poor structural logic on the part of the filmmakers (who don’t even bother to drag out the old standby of having a character grow a beard over time, which may be the only historical-epic cliché they don’t employ).

Given his background, it’s odd that Chan handles the battles far better than he does any other aspect of the movie, although I wish he’d made up his mind exactly how he wanted them depicted. At times they’re dirty and brutal (which is refreshing), while at others they look like standard wuxia fare (which is still entertaining). Untold numbers of men become faceless cannon fodder, slaughtered by rains of arrows or, well, cannon. But then you get bits like the scene where Li rushes headlong into the fray and severs the legs of seven men (who conveniently line up in a perfect semicircle) with one sweep of a lance, then proceeds to single-handedly wreck all of the enemy’s artillery.

The movie can’t decide whether it wants to remain in its expected cultural pigeonhole or break free, so it ends up being a half-assed attempt to do both. The battle scenes ultimately work outside the context of the movie (and one another), but they’re sort of incongruous when viewed inside it.

The movie is presented here in its International Version, which is ten minutes shorter than the cut that played in China. Yes, someone took a page from the Harvey Weinstein playbook and hacked the movie up, the reasons for this still unclear. I’m against this sort of practice altogether, but I really have to wonder what difference ten minutes could possibly have made. Did someone think the potential non-domestic audience for this movie had an attention span that couldn’t exceed 113 minutes?

Whatever the case, what you get here isn’t the cut Chan and his team finally locked, and that’s not the way it should be. Whether or not the missing material helped rectify the movie’s structural, story, and character deficiencies is impossible to say. I do sort of doubt it, but I still wish I’d been given the opportunity to decide.                     

THE VIDEO

The 2.35:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 50GB disc--is just the opposite of the movie: about a third is very problematic, while the rest looks fine. The fine part is dominated by colors that are dark, rich, and earthy. The image is sharp and detailed (close-ups are often a wow), with a film-like appearance that is very pleasing.

What isn’t so fine occurs whenever the movie shifts looks, which is generally during the battles. Sepia tones and a sickly yellow take over, permeating the entire image. Coarse, heavy grain fills the screen, and the encode inevitably gives it a quite noisy appearance.  

THE AUDIO

Two DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks are included here--the original Mandarin track and an English dub (which I sampled just to see how lacking it is. It’s very lacking). The battle scenes are the big draw here, but the quieter scenes deliver in their own way, imbued (and imbuing the movie with) a nice sense of atmosphere and place.

The mix in the battles is amped way up, with superb directionality and movement, and a thundering low end. But most of the effects sound tinny and brittle, as if they’d been sitting in a vault for the past four decades. For example, there’s a moment where the whoosh of a whip rushes from the rears to the fronts and then back again; it’s an intentionally showy, startling effect, but it sounds like something from the old Guy Williams Zorro TV show, working against itself just as much as it works.

English, English SDH, and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Several deleted scenes (50 minutes, presented in a mix of standard- and high-def) help fill the character and story gaps somewhat, but at the same time it’s obvious many of them would have made the movie even more unfocused.

Making of The Warlords (39 minutes, SD) is a collection of seventeen short featurettes that cover such topics as casting, costuming, scripting, stuntwork, etc. 

The Warlords: 117 Days (34 minutes, SD) employs behind-the-scenes footage to chart the course of the movie’s shoot.

The Warlords: Behind-the-Scenes Special (18 minutes) mixes good behind-the-scenes footage with sell-it comments from the cast and crew. 

HDNet: A Look at The Warlords (3 minutes, SD) is another of those annoying HDNet promo pieces.

Closing things out is the movie’s international theatrical trailer (which is presented in standard definition).

FINAL THOUGHTS

Some good performances and well-mounted action can’t compensate for the lackadaisical, hackneyed storytelling.