Legend of the Ancient Sword (2018)

Legend of the Ancient Sword (2018)
Chinese Title: 古剑奇谭之流月昭明
Translation: Ancient Sword Mystery of the Bleeding Moon it Brought

Starring: Wang Leehom, Victoria Song, Karena Ng, Godfrey Gao, Archie Kao, Julian Cheung, Yan Liu
Director: Renny Harlin
Action Director: Qin Pengfei

 

Renny Harlin has had an interesting career. In the early 1990s, he directed some really great action blockbusters in Hollywood, like Die Hard 2; Cliffhanger, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. They were not the most intelligent action movies, but they had great stunts, the right amount of impressive explosions, and were just a lot of fun. Unfortunately, The Long Kiss Goodnight and another high-profile project, Cutthroat Island--both vehicles for Harlin's then-wife Geena Davis--were massive failures at the box office and cast something of a shadow on his career. Renny was able to bounce back with his so-bad-it's-sublime Deep Blue Sea, but then squandered that good will on the Stallone racing pic Driven. With other low-profile losers like Mindhunters, it seemed like Harlin was never going to be able to rise to the heights he had achieved in the first half of the 1990s.

Somewhere along the way, however, Renny Harlin found himself in China working with one the greatest action stars of all time: Jackie Chan. The resulting film was the action-comedy Skiptrace (2016). It must have been a success in the PRC--all of Chan's films seem to do that, their quality notwithstanding--because Harlin found himself contracted to do some more movies there. One of those was Legend of the Ancient Sword, an adaptation of a popular mobile game, which seems pretty far removed from the likes of the modern action thrillers that Renny initially built his career on. However, I have to give it to him: he actually made a more entertaining wuxia fantasy than genre veteran Ching Siu-Tung did with Jade Dynasty. It's not great cinema, but it does feel like a close approximation (and update) of the mile-a-second paced wuxia films from the 1990s, where they would try to cram 1000 pages of story into a 100 minute film. This time, Harlin is cramming 100 hours of gameplay into a 90-minute spectacle.

Legend of the Ancient Sword is set in a Fantasy Asia-land (much like how a lot of third and fourth-generation console RPGs use medieval England as a starting point), where people and demons/spirits co-exist and where magical powers have largely been forgotten, except by those who use it to make and power steampunk robots. Yeah, okay. Our hero is Yue (Wang Leehom of Avenging Fist and Little Big Soldier), a wanderer who gets into Real Steel-esque robot fights in order to raise money to finance his trek across the world in search of his master, Xie Yi (who'll be played by American-born actor Archie Kao, best known for his role on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation"). Yue eventually finds his way into a posh, demon-run club (complete with a Cthulhu-esque octopus as the DJ) where a magical ring--supposedly having belonged to Xie Yi--is going to be auctioned. Yue gets into a bidding war with Xia Yize (the late Godfrey Gao, of Shanghai Fortress), a handsome swordsman with Iceman powers. The bidding war turns into an actual fight, which is exacerbated by the appearance of spear-wielding warrior chick Wen Renyu (K-pop singer Victoria Song), who also wants the ring. Then the bad guys show up for the ring, planting man-eating trees at the establishment (!) and all sorts of madness ensues. The three rivals are rescued at the last second by the sudden arrival of Xie Yi and his magical airship, piloted by a talking panda. No, I'm not making any of this up.

In any case, Xie Yi whisks the three away in search of the Enlightened Sword, a mythical weapon that is so powerful it can defeat a powerful demon known as Mindslayer. Why, you ask? Well, it seems that there was a goddess named Cang Ming (Yan Liu of Badges of Fury) who got tired of living in the heavens. So she and her high priest, Shen Ye (Extreme Crisis's Julian Cheung), made a deal with the Mindslayer to plant blood-sucking trees known as magic trees on the Earth in order to revive the Demon, who would then grant them power to leave their heavenly home and destroy the Earth. And since the Enlightened Sword was the only thing that could defeat the Mindslayer, you'd assume the bad guys want that too, but only to protect their new patron. But the sword was destroyed millenia before, so now everybody is looking for the shards, which have been transformed into other objects. The ring from the previous sequence was one such object. And now the search is on for the remaining pieces...and we're only at the 25-minute mark.

The story structure for Legend of the Ancient Sword is very RPG in its execution. It feels a little episodic, with the heroes having to go on mini-quests in order to prepare themselves for a fight against the Ultimate Evil. New allies are found as the quest progresses. Each sub-quest feels like it ends with a mini-boss showdown. Things like magic and magical steampunk technology sit comfortably aside one another without anybody batting an idea. In some ways, this feels like a wuxia film adaptation of games like Final Fantasy or Phantasy Star. And really, this movie has it all: animal demons, robot battles, sword fights, magic duels, parallel worlds, mermaids, giant killer plants, beautiful goddesses, airships, and more! And Renny Harlin keeps the film moving at a quick clip, rarely losing time for fluffy and shallow character interaction, which is what killed most of Jade Dynasty.  Everything said and done in this movie is to push the story forward. That does come at the cost of the character development, in which we learn the character's background and motivations in a few lines of dialog, much like you would in a Sega Genesis era RPG. But even Hong Kong action classics like The Magnificent Warriors suffered from that sort of writing, so I won't begrudge this movie too much.

People looking for quality action might complain about the overuse of wires and CGI in the fighting, brought to you by Qin Pengfei. Qin started his career doing stuntwork in the Red Cliff films and had graduated to stunt coordinator by the time God of War rolled around. There is swordplay and weapons-based combat, although a lot of it is wired-up and/or mixed in with characters using magic attacks. Singer/actress Victoria Song gets the most "visceral" action in, whacking nameless goons around with her spear--choreographed and edited similar to Donnie Yen doing the same thing in Hero. Wang Leehom, the main protagonist, does a lot of wire-assisted acrobatics and stunts involving grappling hooks and robotic shields. Godfrey Gao plays something equivalent to an Esper or Elf, in which he's just as good with magic as he is with a melee weapon. That translates into: he likes to fire freeze blasts at his opponents before whaling on them with his sword. A fourth protagonist, Ruan (Ip Man 3's Karena Ng), shows up later in the film and is the teams resident magic user/mage. All her attacks are magic-based.

The CGI isn't all that bad. It never took me out of the movie, and since it was used for things like killer plants, giant tentacle monsters, talking pandas, and floating cities, it's easier to get sucked into the fantasy world than it is when it's used for car chases and explosions, which could and should be realized via practical effects. As it stands, this is probably my favorite Chinese CGI fantasy to date. I never was huge on The Storm Riders like a lot of people were in the late 90s and early 00s. A Man Called Hero left me cold because it couldn't reconcile the implications of people using magical martial arts in an otherwise real-world, rational setting. The first two Monkey King movies couldn't draw me into their world and story. Sorcerer and the White Snake didn't have much to recommend it beyond one of Jet Li's last film appearances and Eva Huang's beauty. Jade Dynasty spun its wheels for 75 minutes before actually developing an actual story. This film was actually kind of interesting to watch from beginning to end, just because of its video game sensibilities and Renny Harlin's sure hand at directing.