By Jake Wilson
★★★½
The fresh-faced Gengxin Lin plays the sword master of the titleCredit: China Lion Entertainment
A conscious throwback to to the wuxia films of the 1970s – tales of derring-do in ancient China – Derek Yee's Sword Master can be recommended with enthusiasm to anyone in the mood for a stylish adventure story. That's not surprising, given the film's pedigree: Yee starred in an earlier adaptation of the same source material, Death Duel, in 1977, and has teamed up here with the great Tsui Hark (Chinese Ghost Story) who serves as co-writer and producer.
The fresh-faced Gengxin Lin plays the sword master of the title, a legendary figure who has sworn off violence and gone incognito, taking the most inconspicuous jobs available, as a handyman in a brothel and later as a sewage collector. Inevitably, though, others start to catch on to his true identity, including a rival (Peter Ho) who styles himself as a pantomime villain with facial tattoos and Alice Cooper makeup.
But there's more to the plot than the struggle between the two men. Complicating factors include the women in the hero's life, opposed in a manner that makes a pleasant change from the formula of pitting a virtuous girl against a bad one. The humble villager Xiou Li (Mengjie Jiang) remains innocent despite working in the brothel to support her family, while the scornful, aristocratic Qiudi (Yiyan Jiang) will stop at nothing to get revenge on her former love.
Though the actors bring enough flair to their roles to hold our interest, the plot is mainly a bridge between the fight sequences, staged in a decorative, nearly abstract way. Every gesture is bigger than life: bands of assassins move in unison like dancers in a dream ballet, objects are sliced up in mid-air, characters somersault over rafters or dart about so rapidly they can appear in multiple places at once. The body count is high, but everything is so stylised that even the spurts of blood never seem particularly gruesome.
Far slicker than its 1970s models – which had to rely purely on wire-work rather than digital effects – the film, paradoxically, is still more unreal, hardly trying to convince us that these impossible feats are occurring in solid physical settings. Here, artifice is all. Colours are digitally brightened, the camera glides with inhuman smoothness, and even the outdoor scenes have a blatant "studio" look, allowing the natural world, with its swirling snowflakes and blazing sunsets, to conduct itself as flamboyantly as the characters do.