Brotherhood of Blades
2014; directed by Lu Yang

The period kung fu pool is a crowded one, with a new release seemingly coming out every few weeks. This time out, we have Brotherhood of Blades, which will be released by Well Go USA on North American home video February 10. The film has its high points -- namely, the action scenes, which are coordinated by Corey Yuen stunt team member Sang Lin -- but they aren't quite enough to make this movie rise above its contemporaries.

The plot centers around a trio of imperial assassins (Chang Chen, Wang Qian-Yuan, and Ethan Li Dong-Xue) who are tasked with killing an eunuch (Chin Shih-Chieh) who has become too powerful for the emperor's liking. The assassins launch a bold plan, and seem to have success in their grasp, until one of them makes a decision that marks them as traitors.

Brotherhood of Blades's main issue is the pacing of the story. Some other reviewers seem to appreciate the more complex nature of the storytelling, but this particular one was off-put a bit by director Lu Yang's style. He's still a young filmmaker, and seems intent on impressing on the audience that he is a (da da dum) serious artist, inserting dramatics and (more annoyingly) flashbacks when the story should have just been able to develop organically. Also -- and again, this just may be this grizzled writer lamenting about the "good old days" while crying into a tall glass of Foster's -- but the whole "period kung fu pieces full of double-crosses and intrigue" subgenre is getting a bit old and stale, to say the least.

It takes a lot for a film in this realm to really stand out, and Brotherhood of Blades doesn't quite get there. There seems to have been a lot of potential here, but ultimately, the movie falls prey to both genre conventions and Mainland governmental censorship; in particular, the ending seems to have been tacked on to satisfy the great (or, rather, not-so-great) red overlords who have been controlling the rudder of China's film industry for quite some time now.

RATING: 6.5

Brotherhood of Blades is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD from Amazon. The release from Well Go USA has not been edited from the original theatrical cut and is in Mandarin with English subtitles. Extras on the disc based versions include several trailers for various Well Go releases and an English dubbed track.