The Three Swordsmen (1994)

"I don't understand"

The Three Swordsmen had an excellent cast-Andy Lau, Brigitte Lin, and Elvis Tsui as the titular swordsmen. And that's pretty much it. I have watched a number of old kung fu movies with convoluted plots, but this one took the cake. When a character made the comment, "I don't understand," I wanted to say, you and me both dude.

Andy Lau played "Smiling Sam"/Siu Sam Siu one of the three best swordsmen in the country. He was tied with "Blade" Wham Dao (Elvis Tsui) whose skills had earned him a place commanding the military. Most perplexing was Brigitte Lin as Ming Kim/Ming Jian who was not cross-dressing but actually playing a married man with a child and dubbed with a man's voice. Siu was framed for theft, rape, and murder. And that's about as much as I can tell you. He steals a man's wife. Falls in love with someone else. Ming helps him out or so he says. Wham discerns that something else is afoot, but palace and other politics preclude him from investigating the case as he would wish.

The fights were ridiculously dreadful. The director enjoyed filming too close or at odd angles obscuring much of the action. Yuen Bun and Tony Leung Siu Hung could usually be counted on for entertaining fight choreography, not in this film. The wire work and light body super leaping were comically bad. There was an awkward duel in the trees and over water predating CTHD and Hero, but were a prime example of how valuable good direction and cinematography are. Siu had his Invisible Whirlwind technique which belonged on a Saturday morning kids' show. He could also decapitate and disarm opponents with his clothes. One woman like a white-haired witch could defeat opponents with her hair. She even paused during a fight to breast feed her child.

The film was not pleasing to look at, the framing and cinematography were subpar. The pacing was erratic. And seriously, why would they dub Brigitte Lin of all people with a man's voice? It didn't appear to be done satirically. You know a story is confusing when characters have to stop and repeatedly dump pages of complicated and baffling exposition on the audience. It also felt like half the cast was playing the movie for laughs, especially Lau. Lin and Tsui were deadly serious along with a few other characters. I wondered if two writers wrote different parts of the story separately and then tried to do a mash-up of them.

The Three Swordsmen could have been so bad it was good. I found it so bad as to be annoying. The only good thing about the movie is that it was only 86 minutes long.

6/26/23

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