Fridae

Set in the long decline of the Ming Dynasty, 14 Blades covers the same court intrigue, corrupted bureaucracy, power-hungry eunuchs and the Eastern Depot secret service as King Hu’s A Touch of Zen. While King Hu saw his wuxia classic as a commentary on Ian Fleming’s spy thrillers, Daniel Lee appears to have his sight set on reworking the spaghetti western in a wuxia context.

The real fun begins when Qinglong (Donnie Yen) kidnaps a bride (played by Zhao Wei) en route to the western borderlands of China to retrieve the stolen imperial seal while on the run from his own secret agency. It is only here that we enter full-blown spaghetti Western territory, with the Emperor’s top spy and fighter as the typical Western anti-hero – brutal, single-minded and with little time for niceties, and armed (like Franco Nero in Django) with the most powerful weapon in the desert: the “14 blades” of the title.

Like a typical Western, there is the prerequisite bickering between the lead couple, a smouldering revolution about to take place, an episode with a bandit gang, a ruse involving a mountain ambush, a raid on a military garrison involving high explosives, and a point in the movie where just about every faction wants to get its hands on the treasure - including a Turkish stripper-assassin whose name is literally “strip, strip!” (we’ll leave the details of her killing moves to your imagination).

Part of the fun is to watch just how far Daniel Lee will go to twist the wuxia genre into his spaghetti Western construct and wondering if it’ll work out all right or stumble by the second act, just like most of his ambitious film narratives to date.

The verdict? Daniel Lee still retains his iconic visual style but his grasp on the genre, while decent, can be quite wanting at times. Villains are dispatched prematurely or too incompetently for dramatic tension, while some character arcs don’t develop according to the logic of the genre Lee has chosen. All in all, 14 Blades is a visual treat as well as a rare exercise in King Hu-style genre bending.