Fridae

I’m a sucker for Donnie Yen’s action films. To me, he’s an Asian Steven Seagal, continuously portraying characters who overpower and outclass their foes by a few magnitudes (and hence lack any real challenge to deserve the title of hero) and at least once in every film, has his character enter a self-righteous berserker rage to maul or kill minor baddies who don’t deserve that kind of punishment. My favourite Donnie Yen films are of course the ones where he does just that while starring as some historical Chinese hero like Ip Man.

In The Lost Bladesman, Donnie Yen outdoes himself as Guan Yu, nowadays known as the Chinese “God of War” and the patron saint of policemen and secret society gangsters alike. The film recounts an episode known as The Flight of Guan Yu in Ming dynasty propagandist Luo Guangzhong’s novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, where the general resigns from his service to Cao Cao in Loyang and stages a thousand-mile ride from the capital to reunite with his sworn brother Liu Bei – but not before mowing down 6 generals (who were under Cao Cao’s orders to let Guan Yu pass) and wrecking 5 passes in his so-called escape.

I’m sure the team of Alan Mak and Felix Chong (who jointly gave us Internal Affairs) do realise the cascading ironies of having Donnie Yen play the romanticised hero Guan Yu in one of the not-so-heroic episodes of a propaganda novel. Like Hu Mei in Confucius and Zhang Yimou in Hero, the duo here are interested in what some people would call historical revisionism. Their project is to take the halo off Guan Yu, to abandon the Romance of the Three Kingdoms interpretation of the great hero and in favour of a certain historically informed deconstruction of his mythology – while providing us an action flick.

The duo are successful in creating a very flawed protagonist – a killing machine who possesses the brutality and arrogance of traditional Three Kingdoms villains like Lu Bu, professes great loyalty to his leaders without realising he’s a mere pawn in a game of thrones – in short, a protagonist without a true purpose or vision, a bladesman and not a hero.

They succeed not because of Donnie Yen, but because of Jiang Wen’s portrayal of Cao Cao as a dangerously genre savvy mastermind who realises that no matter what he does for the peace of the realm, he’d be vilified by cheap propagandists like Luo Guangzhong decades and centuries later. Where Zhang Yimou failed in Hero, Mak and Cheong succeed because like Milton, they are of the devil’s party, giving the films cleverest and funniest lines to the much-maligned Cao Cao.

This film is made for those who are bored with the traditional Three Kingdoms stories and would love to see the novel deconstructed.