The increasingly familiar annual Chinese New Year release slate tends now to arrive with two separate guarantees: the first, assured box office success; and the second, exceptionally middling results in terms of quality. Mining genres lends the propagandistic messaging a new skin, be it Operation Red Sea (2018) or The Wandering Earth (2019); while other entries in the lunar pantheon, such as the Creation of the Gods (2023-2025) series and Tsui Hark’s endeavors to kickstart a Legends of the Condor Heroes (2025), gravitate toward the vacuous or outright confusing. What is not missed in all of this is an often extravagant, near-groundbreaking use of computer-generated effects and some rigorously well-staged action.
It’s with this context in mind that it comes as a genuine surprise that veteran director, stunt coordinator, actor, and action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping has delivered an uncomplicatedly excellent exercise in tentpole spectacle. On the face of it, this statement of surprised praise will register as absurd for an artist involved in everything from Drunken Master (1978), the Once Upon a Time in China (1991-1992) series, Iron Monkey (1993) and The Matrix (1999-2003) trilogy. Yet when the likes of giants like Tsui and Dante Lam are sanded down to fit the new paradigm, it strikes as meaningful that such enjoyment comes without fetters.
In some sense, this could be viewed as a byproduct of the genre at hand, the wuxia, in which a lone swordsperson — in this case, Wu Jing playing Dao Ma — with a feeling of disenchantment toward the government and society finds their nobility reignited, as corrupt state agents and paramilitaries sow chaos that threatens newly found friends and the people at large. It’s a mix of tropes laid down without true parallel by none other than King Hu, who — while by no measure apolitical in his constructions (i.e. Dragon Inn [1967], A Touch of Zen [1970], and The Valiant Ones [1975]) — set in stone a framework malleable enough for expression in terms of generic righteousness that need not find itself overburdened in matters of critique. The outcome of such simplicity speaks for itself when measured beside Tsui’s aforementioned New Year effort last year: where Condor Heroes becomes burdened in effects-driven, intertextual nonsense doomed to struggle to find a meaningful comment on the dueling Chinese dynastic factions contrived into conflict for the purposes of on-the-nose commentary, Yuen’s Blades of the Guardians suffers from no such hang-ups, thankfully.
Here, as mentioned, Dao Ma (Wu Jing) is a disgraced top-level imperial guardian who now operates as a bounty hunter, with his deceased sister’s son in tow (along with a big secret as to the boy’s parentage). His work soon finds him crossing the wrong criminal faction and police apparatus paths, and a variety of chases and tribal alliances ensues, as corrupt imperial forces follow, eventually leading to a great showdown in which chivalry and virtue win out. While perhaps sounding understated, the result is a throwback to the likes of Yuen’s own Tai-Chi Master (1993) and Wing Chun (1994) in which relative simplicity dominates so that the action and stuntwork are able to take center stage. Blades deviates little, with the skills of Wu Jing (it has been a while since we’ve seen him in the register, after years embodying varying models of stoic father and soldier in other blockbusters), Nicholas Tse, and Max Zhang, like Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh before them, allowed to become the film’s central draw, as they find themselves thrown into a variety of set pieces that do the simple but important work of reminding viewers why they liked these films in the first place.
The nature of the entertainment on offer here brings with it lingering queries, such as the degree of influence the ongoing achievements in direct-to-streaming Chinese actioners may be having on the blockbuster sphere; after all, the broad outline of Blades registers as little different to the Eye for an Eye (2022-2024) series and Blade of Fury (2024), each with their own solo swordsman and Lone Wolf and Cub dynamics. Should any of these works have gone unseen, the recommendations would by all accounts align with the streamers, but that would undersell the degree to which Blades commends itself. The time it offers at the cinema comes guaranteed as a good one, and, as the Hong Kong old guard slowly thins out, the rarity of seeing a now 80-year-old master at work requires no advertisement — setting aside the fact that he has, once again, completely knocked it out of the park.
DIRECTOR: Yuen Woo-ping; CAST: Wu Jing, Nicholas Tse Ting-Fung, Yu Shi, Chen Lijun, Sun Yizhou; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: February 17; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 10 min.
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