The Warlords
Release Date: April 2, 2010
It's a heroic tale of three blood brothers and their struggle in the midst of war and political upheaval. It is based on "The Assassination of Ma," a Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) story about the killing of general Ma Xinyi.
Cast: Jet Li, Andy Lau, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Xu Jinglei, Bao-ming Gu, Xiaodong Guo, Yachao Wang, Bo Zhou
Writers: Xu Lan, Chun Tin Nam, Aubrey Lam
Director: Peter Ho-Sun Chan
Runtime: 1 Hr 50 Min
Set in the midst of war and political upheaval during the Taiping Rebellion of the 1860s, General Pang barely survives a brutal massacre of his fellow soldiers by playing dead, and joins a band of bandits led by Er Hu and Wu Yang. After fighting back attackers from an helpless village, the three men take an oath to become "blood brothers," pledging loyalty to one another until death, but things quickly turn sour and the three men become embroiled in a web of political deceit, and a love triangle between Pang, Er Hu and a beautiful
Released in Asia in December of 2007 under the title Blood Brothers, The Warlords finally will be released in America in April of 2010. It cleaned up at the various Asian film awards ceremonies and the box office, helped by burning $15 million of the film’s $40 million budget on Jet Li’s star power. The producer has explained that the cost was justified purely because the film would never have seen a western release without someone like Jet Li starring.
So we’ve got the first English language trailer below, which isn’t dubbed because that would take away from the glory that is Movie Trailer Guy. “In a world where the characters can’t speak for themselves because the budget didn’t include dubbing … ” … well at least the screams don’t need dubbed, because they resonate in the universal tongue of oh-dear-there’s-a-sword-in-my-spleen.
Well if it’s as good as the awards and press seem to think it is - and if you can’t trust the honesty of institutions like that in a communist dictatorship, what has the world come to? - this trailer doesn’t seem to show it. The ass-kickers-in-chief run around waving swords and fancy pole ax thing-a-dings, stare broodingly across the battlefield, and then both sides charge at each other whilst screaming, and oh the requisite tracking shot of a cavalcade of arrows hissing across the blue yonder, can’t forget that one. Look, if you’re not even going to try and you’re just going to advertise it as Braveheart 2: Dragons in Kilts you could at least put Jet Li in the blue face paint.
