The Guillotines (2012)

The Guillotines (2012)
Chinese Title: 血滴子
Translation: Blood Drop

 

Starring: Ethan Juan, Shawn Yue, Li Yu-Chun, Huang Xioaming, Boran Jing, Zhou Yiwei, Jimmy Wang Yu
Director: Andrew Lau
Action Director: Lee Tat-Chiu

 

I think when they announced that the original Flying Guillotine was going to be remade, it wasn’t something that I was opposed to. I had never seen the original (I still haven’t, for that matter), and I’m aware that its classic status has more to do with its introducing the genre’s most infamous exotic weapon, than for being an action classic per se. I was more or less ambivalent to the whole exercise, even up to the announcement that Andrew Lau was going to direct. I’m no fan of Lau’s, despite the fact that he has some important genre credits to his name. I figured that at the very least, it might have some decent action sequences and good production values. Fifty percent of my expectations were met.

Set during the early days of the Qianlong Emperor, circa 1740, we from an opening narration that the government employs a secret organization of assassins known as the “Guillotines” to kill political enemies and rebels. The current target of the Guillotines is a Jesus Christ-like man named Wolf (Huang Xiaoming, The Banquet and Ip Man 2). Wolf is promising eternal life to his followers—which made me wonder if he was patterned after Hong Xiuquan of the Taiping Movement—if they help him defeat the emperor…or so the Guillotines are informed. In the opening scene, the Guillotines kill the Wolf’s officers and arrest him.

The leader of the Guillotines, Leng (Ethan Juan, of The Assassin), has an audience with Wolf. Wolf informs him that he has received revelation from Heaven that Leng is to kill him, but not at that time or place. At the execution of Wolf, his followers show up to save him, killing hundreds of Qing soldiers in the process. The Guillotines show up as well, but Wolf takes the team’s sole female member, Musen (Li Yu-Chun, Bodyguards and Assassins and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate), hostage.

Following that fiasco, the Guillotines are more or less disbanded, although they remain together to rescue Musen. Accompanying them on their journey is the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, Haidu (Shawn Yue, of Dragon Tiger Gate and The Brink). Haidu, Leng and the Emperor were actually raised together until they were about ten, after which Leng was sent to become a member of the Guillotines and Haidu was trained for more formal military service. While Haidu still respects and honors Leng, he has nothing but contempt for Leng’s cohorts, whom he considers to be nothing but uneducated ruffians.

The Guillotines and Haidu eventually find the town that Wolf and his followers are holed up in. The town is in shambles, full of Han Chinese people who have been discriminated against by the Manchu rulers and decimated by a smallpox outbreak. An initial attempt to trade hostages—the Guillotines captured Wolf’s wife during the previous rescue mission—goes awry when the military’s new rifle squad shows up and starts fire indiscriminately at everybody. Moreover, the Emperor’s new vision of modernizing the military means that secret assassins like the Guillotines are no longer necessary. Combine that with Haidu’s disgust for them, and things go to hell very quickly.

As with most stories that Andrew Lau gets his mits on, The Guillotines tells an ambitious story with an epic scope. This works better here than it did with Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen, where the middle act was all about rescuing important Chinese officials whom we the viewer had never seen and thus had no reason to actually care about. There are a lot of characters, and we never get to know the individual members of the Guillotines other than Leng and Musen, but the story rarely gets so convoluted that it’s hard to follow. I need to point out that there are a lot of tears shed here. Almost every character that dies sheds a single tear before kicking the bucket, and there’s lots of man-crying on display. The acting is pretty good all around, for that matter

Lau arguably tackles a theme too many here, touching upon classism, brotherhood, equality among races, modern weapons rendering traditional martial arts obsolete, free will, and a few others I can’t be bothered to remember. The very last scene features your obligatory pro-China message, where one character counsels the emperor to ensure peace by treating everybody as equal and distributing the wealth equally. And, according to Wikipedia, the Emperor Qianlong was responsible for the most prosperous period of the Qing Dynasty, for better or worse.

Where the movie ultimately fails is the action, which is surprising (or not) considering that it’s a big-budget period piece directed by Andrew Lau. Whatever you think of CGI in your wuxia pian, films like The Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero both had their moments when it came to action, even if the effects themselves haven’t aged well over the years. Sadly, there is a lot of CGI here and it’s never believable. Heck, the CGI person gets pushed off a cliff is done so badly that it threatened to derail the entire film. Most of the CGI is used on the titular weapon, which has been modified to up its Coolness Factor.

The new flying guillotine is now a sickle-like blade that balances metal ring. The ring is full of gears and blades, although somehow it can be collapsed and wrapped around the user’s forearm. When read, the ring spins at the tip of the sickle until the user launches it. It can slash a person while flying, or it can land on the person’s head, where an unconvincingly complex mechanism causes it to function like the old school flying guillotine. Like I said, lots of gears and moving parts for a weapon developed in the 18^th century, and mainly an excuse for Andrew Lau to thrown in CGI effects where there would normally not be any.

But here’s the real kicker: the flying guillotine, the weapon that gives this film the title, is used only in the first two action sequences of the film. That’s right, a movie that is a conceptual remake of The Flying Guillotine stops showing off the weapon after the first twenty minutes of the film. In fact, there is practically no action—weapons or open-handed combat—after the second set piece. Occasionally, a character will throw someone on the ground and repeatedly punch them in the face, or get stabbed to death with farm implements. Once in a while, someone will pick up a melee weapon and charge the rifle squad, only to get mowed down before actually doing anything. Heck, the film promises a climax between the ill-equipped peasant followers of Wolf and the Qing Army, complete with sharpened logs and homemade explosives, only for Qings to quickly quash it all using cannons. Yeah, yeah, it might go along with the theme of modern armaments vs traditional warfare, but f*** you, people!

Having watched and enjoyed three of the four major old school movies about the flying guillotine, I can’t help but think that Andrew Lau chose the wrong source material to develop his themes contrasting modern and traditional weapons. The fact that the movie paints traditional weapons as being ineffective and passé is bizarre, considering the non-existent steampunk technology used to make the flying guillotine function. It’s thematically inconsistent and a cheat to the audience, who want to see kung fu fights that result in dozens of people getting decapitated. Leave it friggin’ Andrew Lau to give us an action-less action film. At least it didn’t get nominated for Best Action Choreography at the 2013 Hong Kong Film Awards. That would’ve been the last effin’ straw.