With Li catering to the martial arts crowd, Lau and Kaneshiro provide the eye candy, but neither really shines. Lau, as the simple illiterate peasant who is also the voice of conscience, is rather too prone to tears, and Kaneshiro is too busy managing his boy-band good looks to really pull off his role as Jiang, who commits himself totally to the idea of "one for all and all for one," and is torn apart when the ideal comes unstuck. The only woman in the movie, Xu Jinglei (徐靜蕾) as the enigmatic Lian, gets the short end of the stick in a belated attempt to cement the loyalty of the brothers - brotherhood movie credentials don't come any clearer than that. The love triangle between Pang and Cao never really gets off the ground, but Xu manages to give mud and matted sheepskin cloaks a quite improbable sexiness - no mean feat - but it is the politics of success that really drives the movie.
While the cinematography is generally excellent and the fight scenes - including a magnificently choreographed charge, first of infantry and then of cavalry into a sea of enemy troops - is gut-wrenching to watch, the script often lumbers along. There is also a rather eerie effect when rain - and there is a lot of rain - falls around the protagonists rather then on them when they are doing their close-up emotional scenes. It's as if there is an invisible shield around their faces that ensures the tears are not lost in the rain, and they get to enunciate their somewhat platitudinous sentiments without spluttering.
The Warlords takes itself seriously as a film about ideas and is as good a reprise to the conventional Hong Kong cinema staple of brotherhood as one could hope for. It's addition of a thought-provoking take on the horrors of war and the lure of gambling with the lives of others makes it outstanding, for all its faults, and with luck will steer other Chinese director away from endless efforts to remake Ang Lee's (李安) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍).
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