Jet Li goes to war

Peter Chan's (陳可辛) big-budget costume drama The Warlords is something of a revelation after the succession of recent Chinese history flicks that have tried to rival Hollywood and been found wanting.

Trashy confections such as Zhang Yimou's (張藝謀) Heroes (英雄), Chen Kaige's (陳凱歌) The Promise (無極) and Stanley Tong's (唐季禮) The Myth (神話) come to mind with a shudder of shame and despair over how so much talent could be so misdirected. The Warlords is anything but perfect, but at least it remains committed to its story about brotherhood, the horrors of war and the price paid for ambition, managing to overcome its numerous lapses and hold the audience by the balls through its two-hour length. It's not always a comfortable feeling.

Loosely based on historical characters, The Warlords tells the story of General Pang Qingyun, who having lost one army after being abandoned by a rival colleague, throws in his lot with a group of bandits and uses their savagery and desperation to claw his way back into military favor. Bloody battles are fought, victories celebrated and tens of thousands of people killed. In the process, Pang abandons the few principles he ever had, betrays those closest to him to establish his position at court and is eventually assassinated. The action takes place against the background of the Taiping Rebellion (太平天國), a period of civil war that almost toppled the tottering Qing Dynasty, and during which a weak and corrupt government spent almost as much energy in internal conflict as it did trying to suppress the rebel movement.

In The Warlords, Chan has decided to paint on a big canvas, with much of the action taking place in China's stark and forbidding hinterlands. Starvation, willful destruction, rape and rapine are all part of the daily currency of life. The hideousness of war and the carnage wrecked on ordinary people for the ambition of a few are both forcefully underlined. The use of screen text to note the massive scale of casualties - 20 million are estimated to have perished through famine and massacre - and the voice-over by Takeshi Kaneshiro's (金城武) character, are good old-fashioned and very unsubtle ways of making Chan's themes clear. The violence of the battle sequences is sometimes breathtaking, and Chan manages to convey the ecstatic blood lust of his main characters - the smell of success is the smell of the enemies' blood and hacked off limbs - without glorifying the conflict. Graphic scenes of mutilation and the mass execution of unarmed prisoners are not for weak stomachs, though Chan relies more on his audience's imagination than buckets of gore. Indeed, the washed out, almost monochrome palette, reminiscent of the battle sequences in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, gives the film an impressively harsh and gritty look, and sets up a stark contrast to the saturated colors used after the three warlords of the film's title fight their way to success.

Another theme is that of brotherhood and the harsh toll extracted on friendship by ambition. Pang and his two bandit colleagues gamble everything - their own lives and the lives of the followers. But when the hard moral decisions are faced, brotherhood begins to strained. One of the most interesting revelations from The Warlords is that Jet Li (李連杰) can actually act, and he stands up well against Andy Lau (劉德華) and Kaneshiro, emerging as the most convincing of the three. Admittedly, his role is not one that demands great subtlety, but the driving ambition and the duplicity to which it gives rise are effectively conveyed. Having done an adequate job with Fearless (霍元甲, 2006), another Chinese history flick, it is encouraging to see Li cementing his escape from what seemed an endless cycle of Asian exotics that started out with his role in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), and followed by Romeo Must Die (2000), Kiss of the Dragon (2001), Cradle 2 Grave (2003) and most recently Rogue Assassin (2007).