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Today, I’m thinking about job searches, and that delicate balance between a large company and a small company. At a giant corporation, roles tend to be better defined, and resources can be allocated to deal with problems according to a procedure that is well understood. On the other hand, corporations tend to be ruthless in punishing acts of creative problem-solving, and regardless of what they tell you in the weekly pep talk, improvisation is a sin. Small firms are the opposite; they expect employees to show up in the morning, and wing it. Your job description? Make more money for the boss. When something goes wrong, the only formal procedure is, “Don’t let your manager find out.” One business model produces results which are consistently stale; the other is wildly unpredictable. (I generalize, of course.) Somewhere in the middle is the sort of company I get along with: the glorious mid-sized firm with enough procedures to keep from going too deep down the rabbit hole before I’ve had my coffee, but with enough flexibility to let people use good judgment without fearing reprisal.

So, while I’m thinking about the blend between formal procedures and improvisation, let’s talk about The Blade. No, not the Wesley Snipes film about a guy with the powers of both man and oatmeal; I’m writing about Tsui Hark’s remake of the Shaw Brothers classic One Armed Swordsman.

Release
Red Sun. Widescreen, Cantonese with English subtitles.

Starring
Xin Xin Xiong, Moses Chan, Man Cheuk Chiu (a.k.a. Vincent Zhao), Valerie Chow, Collin Chou (a.k.a. Ngai Sing), Jason Chu, Michael Tse

In Brief
A smith, famous for the quality of his swords, has wandered through the hinterlands for years. His daughter, Siu Lung, who does not have cable, entertains herself by trying to start a fight between two of the employees at the smithy: Ding On and Iron Skull. Ding On is an ORPHAN who has been with the smithy since he was a young child. Iron Skull has been around for a few years. The two young men are close friends, and do not take the bait.

As tends to be the way with sword sellers, they find themselves doing business in a town filled with conflict, particularly, a pack of bandits with some kind of bear trap fetish. The bandits want to find one or more women to entertain them. They are not asking nicely. Fortunately for the local women, the biggest, baddest, toughest monk in all China happens to be in town. Ding On and Iron Skull watch the fight.

The monk runs the bandits off, but those crafty bastards set a trap for the monk. A bear trap. When the monk is killed, Iron Skull wants to round up his coworkers, and take revenge. Ding On follows his employer’s philosophy of non-intervention. This becomes the first real sticking point between the boys.

Ding On is named as successor to the master smith, but the other employees are more interested in following Iron Skull to fight bandits, and Ding On is finding his job distasteful. He’s still a bit irked that the business with the monk has not had closure, and he doesn’t think he commands the respect of his peers. Perhaps Ding On is also tired of being asked to work 18-20 hour shifts to help catch up while the dope who works mornings continues to slack off. Ding On is on his way to abandoning the whole sorry situation when he learns a dark secret about his past: His father was killed by a notorious bandit named Fei Lung.

With that secret… Ding On follows through on his plan to quit.

Quitting turns out to be a mixed blessing. The boss’s fruit loop daughter is still hell-bent on provoking some kind of bloodshed. She charges out into bandit land. In a fortunate coincidence, Ding On is at hand to rescue her, but in the process, gets a hand torn off in a bear trap. He falls off a cliff, temporarily out of the picture as far as everyone else is concerned. Meanwhile, Iron Skull and the rest of the apprentice smiths arrive, and continue the fray with the bandits.

My mistake was grabbing for the cheese.

Ding On wakes up in the care of an ORPHAN called Blackie. Ding On is upset over the loss of his arm; this story takes place in the days before workman’s comp. With his remaining arm, he takes up a job bussing tables at a restaurant.

Fei Lung shows up. What else is he gonna do?

Back in the other plot thread, Iron Skull yanks Siu Ling out of recovery to join him on a quest to find Ding On. Suddenly, she finds the notion of provoking a fight far less romantic.

Meanwhile, Ding On and Blackie get abused by marauding bandits. Ding On finds himself not so good at fighting with just the one arm. The bandits beat him severely, steal everything they can carry, and burn the house down.

My pinata style… Useless!

Well, behind every cloud is a silver lining. Searching the charred wreckage for something to eat, Blackie finds a book, or rather, the remains of a book. It is a manual of a sword style. Ding On has been played, abused, deceived, insulted, and thrashed by damn near everyone else in the film; we’re ready for a good old fashioned “training for revenge” sequence. He begins to study. Unable to afford a new blade, Ding On digs up the remains of his father’s sword. Half a sword and half a manual in his remaining hand, he goes to work.

This is not a gaffe. That other hand is Blackie’s.

The bandits come back, and the vengeance begins.

Nice Shots
The monk brawl is fantastic. The fight itself is mainly drunk-stumbly techniques, some John Wayne Jiutsu with a good, ol’ fashioned Gavel-Head.

Dude, that monk is totally kicking ass on those bandits. I’d take sides, but I have to feed my cat.

The camera angles throw this brawl over the top. We enter the viewpoints of the people in the town, seeing the fight as it spills into our neighborhood, sometimes watching it land unexpectedly in our laps, sometimes watching from the balcony, sighing and shaking our heads that such business could happen here. The sounds are another nice touch. The monk’s punches land like drum beats.

During the first Ding On v. Bandits rumble, Ding On is rolling on the ground with an opponent. The camera rolls while tracking them. The effect is wildly disorienting; every time I watch this shot, I feel like I have to stand up and shake my head before the movie goes on.

Ding On’s training involves suspending himself on a rope while he practices techniques. This cracks me up, because I take it as a joke about wire stunts. And yet, swinging there on his training rope, Ding On begins to understand his movements in a new way, and he has a revelation which fills in what he could not learn from his half-manual. The “ah-ha” experience is captured exquisitely.

Best Stunts
The final brawl at the smithy requires at least two viewings. There are multiple layers of action happening, and the background often contains very impressive work.

Disappointments
Ding On has a bit of flatness to him; he’s our protagonist, but for much of the film he feels like his main function is to be the character against which Iron Skull is measured.

In the original One Armed Swordsman, the swordsman’s wife restrains his desire for violence. In Blade, the tide runs the other way, with Blackie being drawn into Ding On’s fury. No love for pacifism.

Final Analysis
Blade is my favorite movie about a swordsman with one arm. “Underrated” doesn’t quite capture the problem here; more like, “Unknown.” U.S. audiences seem to have had little exposure to this title, and I think plenty of us Yanks would get a kick out of it. 15/4 stars.

If You Like This
Rewind a couple of reviews, and check out the original One Armed Swordsman.

For more Tsui Hark goodness, try Once Upon a Time in China.

If you just want to try your humble reviewer’s favorite relatively unknown action films, follow The Blade with Drunken Monkey and Scorpion King, and no, not the film with the Rock, the one also known as Palette.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 1:14 am and is filed under Chop Socky, Movies, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.