REVIEW: Empress and the Warriors, An (2008)

A fighting heiress (Kelly Chen) to a kingdom in ancient China inherits command of an army divided in a time of war. To cope, she comes to rely on the fighting mastery and loyalty of a battle-hardened general and mentor (Donnie Yen) and the love of a reclusive polymath (Leon Lai). Action director Ching Siu-tung delivers intrigue, romance and epic battle sequences in the tradition of CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER and THE WARLORDS. With impressive set design, attractive cinematography and the image of martial arts superstar Donnie Yen erupting into full berserker mode by the final reel, AN EMPRESS AND THE WARRIORS should be a near masterpiece but it falls far short as a result of Ching’s inability to bring the film’s many distinct assets together into something resembling a well-structured production.

Because this film strives to be more than just an action or martial arts film with its strong romantic and dramatic angle, it requires a strong plot with matching performances from the leads to carry the film. At no point does the film ever settle comfortably into a cohesive narrative, nor do the actions of the leads ever find sufficient grounding in that narrative. Whether the fault of the script, direction or editing process, poorly paced events in the film are crammed together with large gaps in plot and character development left in between. This reduces much of the film to a series of mildly interesting vignettes that add up to next to nothing as a whole.

The film suffers from an identity crisis. Ching’s decision to bring together his wuxia wirework design from the likes of HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS with the more grounded and gritty fighting style he developed for Peter Chan’s THE WARLORDS makes it difficult to know at what point the viewer is supposed to suspend disbelief during fight sequences.

Looking like characters out of Tsui Hark’s wuxia film SEVEN SWORDS, tribal assassins in goblin masks descend from treetops and bound through the forest at the speed of a galloping horse while shooting poison darts and setting off conveniently-placed traps that would have been at home in an INDIANA JONES movie. There is nothing wrong with this type of action unless you’re contrasting it with more conventional warfare as we see later when hundreds of bowmen, armored cavalry, infantry and war chariots collide on a battlefield to engage in the grim business of killing, BRAVEHEART style.

Elaborate yet unreal production design, from the aforementioned goblin masks and invented period armor to B-grade digital backdrops, a Peter Pan-like tree house and a hand-made hot air balloon with the seemingly magical ability to auto-navigate back to its launch point, suggest we’re in an alternate reality but whose? It’s not the well-established wuxia underworld known as the jiang hu that makes up so many Chinese swordplay movies or the mythical realm of the Eight Immortals. The film’s ill-defined visual style and setting awkwardly fall somewhere in between reality and fantasy in a way, similar, yet not quite as terrible as the disaster that was TWINS EFFECT 2.

Restrained performances from all of the leads are highlighted by stoic posturing with Chen giving us many examples of the quiet, introspective gaze at something intangible off screen and Donnie Yen giving us his best menacing looks, backed up by brief spurts of martial excellence. Leon Lai, another pop singer, is the intellectual warrior, or perhaps a Chinese variant of The Professor from GILLIGAN’S ISLAND. We’re expected to believe that a single man living alone in a forest could and would make a massive tree fort connected by a series of gangways that doubles as a launch platform for a hot air balloon created hundreds of years before its first appearance in France in 1783. In his spare time, Lai’s character constructs dozens of elaborate death traps throughout the forest and harvests “special” honey from bees for the treatment of a particular poison that just happens to be the same used by the assassins.

Many films engage in the use of convenient coincidences and leaps of logic in support a generally lazily-written script but this film goes to ridiculous extremes in virtually every aspect of the production. Aside from numerous examples at Lai’s Forest Bungalow of Engineering, Medicine and Occasional Lovemaking, we have a laundry list of sloppiness that ranges from failures to explain how characters logically get from point A to point B to actions such as Yen’s pointless decision to fight Lai that are poorly explained.

Action sequences are well choreographed as expected but generally too short, rushed and oddly balanced between stylized wire-fu and realistic period battles. Ching had a problem with this in THE WARLORDS too where he had these massive WATERLOO-style sequences with armies tearing each other apart and then in the middle of it Jet Li is dropping guys in every direction like a “hack and slash” video game. Ching repeats this by orchestrating a powerful physical performance for Yen as he single-handedly fights an army with a massive blade that looks more like a weapon out of a FINAL FANTASY game than a traditional weapon of China, of which there are many. Had the rest of the movie held this level of intensity and raw energy, it would have been consistently unreal and a lot more entertaining. Unfortunately, we end up with several average martial arts sequences, two brief reality-based battle sequences and a killer one-versus-many martial arts finale, although poorly edited, that sets Donnie Yen loose like we’ve never seen him before and what does it matter? It’s wasted on this film. By this point the audience should be jumping out of their seats and cheering for Yen. This could have been his “sick men of Asia” moment but the build up is weak.

I think I know what the core problem is. Ching Siu-tung has been working in TV production for too long in between film gigs. He tried to fit a TV series into a 95-minute film. AN EMPRESS AND THE WARRIORS may have worked better in long form with time to develop the characters and fill in all the missing pieces that make the film seem so hollow. Above all, this film needed a lot more focus. It could have worked as a war film, a martial arts film, a period romancer, a fantasy film, or a cautionary morality tale about the evils of war. Instead, Ching opted for all of these and ended up with a glossy, superficial mess that will be quickly forgotten amid the flood of period epics coming out of China. It’s a shame Donnie Yen is wasting some of his screen fighting years on films like this and PAINTED SKIN when there are so many more SPLs and IP MANs that he could be starring in that have good stories matched with good kung fu.

REVIEW: Empress and the Warriors, An (2008), 6.1 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

by Mark Pollard

Related Topics:
An Empress and the Warriors (2008)  •  Ching Siu-Tung  •  Donnie Yen