Jade Warrior (2006)

Jade Warrior (2006)
Aka: Jadesoturi

 

Starring: Tommi Eronen, Markku Peltola, Zhang Jingchu, Krista Kosonen, Hao Dang, Cheng Taishen
Director: Antti-Jussi Annila
Action Director: Yu Yankai

 

To understand Jade Warrior, a perfunctory understanding of Finnish folklore is advisable. There is an 19^th-century epic poem known as a Kalevala, which is considered one of the most important works in all of Finnish literature. Much like Prose Edda in Nordic folklore and Die Nibelungen for the Germans, the Kalevala had a pivotal role in establishing the Finnish national identity—for centuries they had belonged to Sweden, after which the territory was ceded to Russia. This particular work strengthened the Finns’ sense of connection to their native language, which helped them strive for their own sovereignty.

The story of the Kalevala initially retells the story of Creation from the point of view of Finnish mythology. It goes into the story of the First Man, Väinämöinen, and his endless (and fruitless) adventures to find a wife. He tries to seduce the daughter of Louhi, a powerful witch, but is unsuccessful. She later promises him one if he can make her a sampo, a magical device that guarantees material prosperity—according to the film The Day the Earth Froze, it can produce endless supplies of grain, gold, etc. Väinämöinen employs the services of a blacksmith named Seppo Ilmarinen. Much like his employer, Ilmarinen wants a wife, but one always seems to elude him. He eventually does make the sampo, and many of the subsequent stories in the Kalevala involve the device and how it affects different characters’ lives.

Jade Warrior takes this myth and combines it with a Chinese legend of a powerful female demon named Nocktress (at least that’s her name in the Portuguese subtitles of the disc I watched) who laid nine eggs. From eight of the eggs were born eight demons: Hate, Avarice, Fear, Ugliness, Greed, Desire… The last egg did not hatch along with the others, but when it finally did, it did not receive a name.

So where do these stories meet? Well, the ninth demon has stolen the sampo with the hopes of establishing Hell on Earth. It is hiding out in a swamp somewhere in China and growing more powerful as time passes. However, there is a prophecy that the son of the blacksmith who forged the sampo is destined to kill the demon and save the world. His reward for doing so will be Nirvana, or Enlightenment, and thus freedom from the cycle of reincarnation.

Jump to Finland in modern times. Kai (Tommi Eronen, of Sauna) is a professional blacksmith whose forge is located on the outskirts of Helsinki. He has recently broken up with his girlfriend, Ronja (Krista Kosonen, who had a small role in Blade Runner 2049), and is pretty down in the dumps about the whole thing. He may even be borderline suicidal at this point. Fate steps in when Ronja visits an antique shop with a handful of Kai’s old things, which she wants to get rid of before leaving town. The owner of the shop, Berg (Markku Peltola), and his colleague, Maria (Elle Kull), are what you might call Kalevala enthusiasts. They have recently come into possession of the mummified remains of a man holding a strange metal ark with Chinese ideograms inscribed on it. Could this be the fabled sampo?

Berg hasn’t be able to open the ark, although he does make an interesting discovery. One of the objects that belonged to guy is filled with ashes, which Ronja pointed out used to be her ex-boyfriend’s hair and fingernails (apparently a blacksmith’s trick for adding carbon to the metal). Well, when Berg’s fingers, dirtied with ash, touch the ark, the object reacts. Berg figures that the ark has something to do with Kai and makes a visit to the boonies to see Kai. After a few visits, Berg shows him the ark and has Kai touch it, which causes the device to open. At this point, Berg starts going crazy and demands that Kai build him a sampo.

As Kai does this, he starts having flashbacks to pre-Dynastic China, in which the Seppu Sintai (also Tommi Ernonen), the son of a Chinese blacksmith and a Finnish woman, is being escorted by a bunch of monks to the swamp where the Ninth Demon resides. He is aware of the prophecy and knows that he is the world’s Only Hope. However, before killing the demon (or getting killed in the process), Sintai asks his friend, Cho (Hao Dang, of Tracing Shadow and The Great Protector), to let him visit Cho’s old village so that he may live like a normal person for one day. Cho relents and Sintai heads to the village, located at the edge of the swamp.

During his visit, Sintai meets Pin Yu (Zhang Jingchu, of Rush Hour 3 and Seven Swords) and falls head over heels for her. While the two grow close after their first meeting, Pin Yu holds a secret that will ultimately cause Sintai to compromise his mission. Meanwhile, as Kai draws closer and closer to completing the sampo, the world draws nearer and nearer to complete destruction.

Jade Warrior is one of those films that you respect for its intentions than the film itself. Obviously, we spent much of the 70s, early 80s, and 90s with wuxia movies that dealt with super-powered warriors battling each other for control of the martial world. When Crouching Tiger,Hidden Tiger came out, it turned the wuxia into a pretentious arthouse affair. Jade Warrior continues this trend, albeit with the added twist of interweaving the story with Finnish folklore and alternating storylines, one of which is set in modern Scandinavia. That is a novel approach, although if you start to think about it for more than a few minutes, it starts to fall apart.

One of the problems is that the movie brings up how the Ancient China portion of the story is set in pre-Dynastic China. Well, the whole bit about Nirvana and leaving the birth cycle is very much a Hindu idea that was imported into Buddhism—Siddartha Gautama was born a Hindu. So, it wouldn’t make sense for that to even be a thing in this movie, since Buddhism did not even reach China until A.D. 65 during the Han Dynasty. And you probably wouldn’t have monks, at least not in the Shaolin monk mold. You can also argue that the Iron Age, iron being the material that the ark and the sampo are presumably been built with, did not start in China until the Warring States period (453 – 221 B.C.), so a pre-Dynastic setting would also not work.

One may also wonder how a Finnish woman (or tribe) would wander all the way into China at that period. As I understand it, the territory we know today as Finland was inhabited by hunter-gatherers in the interior and by the Stone Age Kiukainen culture along the coast during the pre-Shang Dynasty period. And considering that what we know as China was a lot smaller than the current country, a tribe would probably have to travel through what is modern-day Russia, interact with Karasuk pastoralists in Central Asia and then with Altaic pastoralists in western China, before reaching the territory inhabited by early Sino peoples. I suppose if one Neolithic tribe in Finland broke up and wandered east for a few decades or so, they might eventually find their way into China.

I suppose you could negate the above criticisms by presuming that the Finnish woman hailed from Norse (or Finnish) mythology-era Scandinavia and migrated to mythological Yellow Emperor/Huangdi-era China. That way, you could probably get around the bits about whether or not the sampo should have been forged in stone, bronze or iron. And by mythology logic, wandering halfway across the world is easier to swallow as well.

Getting past those details—and trust me, many viewers may not even notice them—you have a slow-moving story with limited settings that practically renders this movie as a chamber piece. That would not be a problem in and of itself, but it makes for a strangely intimate movie about the creation and unleashing of THE DOOMSDAY DEVICE by (whom is essentially) the Devil’s Son. The movie deals with the impending apocalypse in a very subtle manner: mainly scenes showing us the residents of Helsinki standing in the street staring at neon-green clouds in the sky. It is a little spooky, but you would expect that unleashing the Gates of Hell would have a bit more…well…pizzazz. At least Lucio Fulci gave us zombies, maggot storms, killer priests, and people puking up their digestive systems.

There is not a whole lot of fighting in this movie, even if it is nominally a martial arts film. What little we get is choreographed by Yu Yankai. Hong Kong cinema fans will know him best as Collin Chou’s kung fu teacher in Blade of Fury (1993) and the blacksmith who gets his face ripped off by Vincent Zhao at the beginning of Fong Sai Yuk (1993). There is a fight scene early on involving some hunter-gatherers that is filmed and edited a bit chaotically, boding ill for the rest of the movie. Later on, we have one of those old school fight scenes where one character taunts and beats him with a stick in such a way that channels Simon Yuen Siu-Tin tormenting a student in any given late 70s kung fu comedy. Later on, a Chinese man attacks Sintai and the latter evades using all manner of slow motion, wire-assisted flips and acrobatics. The Hero and House of Flying Daggers influence is definitely obvious here.

The next fight is a lot better, which is where Zhang Jingchu and Tommi Eronen have what can best be described as a bagua courting ritual. Pin Yu is testing Sintai’s kung fu and starts performing slow-motion bagua—a lá the good Jet Li in The One—like a synchronized dance. At point point she whips out her signature weapon: a polearm with a fan-like arrangement of blades at one end. I always like seeing that particular internal style in any movie, so it is definitely welcome here, even if the slow motion is overdone. But then again, you could probably make the same complaint about The Grandmaster and Yuen Woo-Ping won an award for that. So what do I know?

The final fight is set in modern times and involves Tommi Eronen attacking an unarmed, doughy, middle-aged man with a pair of sledgehammers. This sequence is actually well-mounted and pretty exciting. I think I liked it even more than the sledgehammer duel at the end of the Japanese MA film Blood Heat. My only complaint is that the denouement of the movie really drags and drags. It wraps up the story well, but we’re talking Return of the King levels of last-second reveals and conclusions. The movie is slow paced as it is, we didn’t need twenty minutes of glacially paced conclusions to interrupt and follow the climax.