Seven Swords

I am often behind the times on the latest trends, so it's nice when I'm occasionally slightly ahead on new movies most people haven't heard of yet. I'm a big fan of Tsui Hark, the man who brought us the Once Upon A Time in China series, Dragon Inn, and The Blade, just to name a few. So I was eager to see Seven Swords, his latest directorial effort which just came out last year. A new Tsui Hark martial arts movie with swords and guys flying around? Sign me up!

Well, I've seen the movie, and it has its good points and bad points. The good part is the action scenes; I've seen flashier fighting, but each of the movie's seven heroes has a different sword of varying abilities. It's pretty cool, just like watching a comic book movie. The action is pretty good, and the film also features some bad guys with some neat weapons for whaling on helpless villagers.


The bad news is that the movie is based on a Chinese novel. In my experience, Chinese novels are generally hundreds and hundreds of pages long, so it's never easy to distill this kind of story into a two and a half hour movie. Seven Swords is basically a "seven samurai"-type movie where a bunch of courageous swordsmen (and one woman) defend a village from being destroyed by a bunch of evil soldiers. Unfortunately, the plot kind of lurches around so I found myself on several occasions saying "huh? what just happened?". At least half of the seven heroes of the story aren't given a whole lot of screen time, so they don't really mean a whole lot to the story. I have a feeling that a lot of the plot and character development was left on the cutting room floor.


In the end, for me this movie was just ok - it's no Tsui Hark masterpiece. It's a shame, because you know they worked really hard to make this movie. Maybe I just need to watch the movie again, but I doubt that will help.

If you really love this movie (and I’m sure there are a lot of people who do) and you've got some money to throw around, there’s a super-deluxo DVD out that includes scale replicas of all the seven swords. Now you and six of your little friends can reenact the movie!