Blade of Fury (2024)
Today, he hunts for himself.
You know the deal - grab a selection of movies, screen them through the gang, narrow it down, then watch. Tonight came down to two of them - a new one (so new it requires a purchase) and the one that won, that didn’t cost anything beyond the subscription and two ad breaks. Think back into a land of floaty martial arts and bounty hunters as somewhere in a past China gets rowdy with plots and morals and sword. They’ve gone and made the wild dog angry, and now it’s time to taste his Blade of Fury.
This won’t be a real unique story to I feel most the people that watch it. It’s not even just limited to the folks who heavy-watch Wuxia flicks - I’m pretty sure this is a tale as old as time. Still, despite opening itself up to easy comparisons to plots that are the same except more elaborate or better handled (and the flip of those), it’s not exactly a bad plot. Guy has some past trauma that he’s not done a great job of getting over, and is now a bounty hunter. Good news is he’s really good at it, bad new is things are about to take a real hard turn for him. After one of his bounties results in the unintentional rescue of a woman harboring a secret, he finds himself on the other end of the bounty list and is going to need to work his way through it if he wants to stay alive with less constant attacks on himself. Guess what though - it’s not as straight forward as expected when he bonds with his next defenseless bounty and has a change of heart.
I don’t speak Chinese. The closes I’ve got is a few words I’ve heard repeated in movies that I’m not even sure I technically know, and the fact that it’s supposedly pronounced with an sh sound instead an x sound when you talk about the genre of movies I’ve consumed a lot of. This does mean that there’s an aspect of acting that’s completely lost to me - the best I have to go off of us what I read in the subtitles. As far as body language goes, there’s a lot of folks doing a good job of playing on the fearless or wacky warrior assassin types. The lead attempts to get the change of heart across as the movie goes - and I feel the mileage might vary a little there. It does feel like there is some softening there, but the lack of me getting the language kind of fogs up if it is more character related or actor presentation. I don’t think any of it is bad though despite that, but I do say it’s kind of a bit “checking the boxes” for a lot of it. Goofy feeling government official bending over backwards to the higher ups? Yep, that’s there. Bounty hunters that send arrows through stone and crawl around all over the ceiling with their clawed weapons? You betcha - all with the expected level of “I’m cool” or “look how spooky I am” that I could see some might pass off as meh even if it’s not that bad to me.
There’s one character that has an arc, and that’s the main. It mostly results in a very typical arc for the soldier goes solo kind of story - does bad things in the past, doesn’t sit well, becomes effectively a vagabond or paid soldier, only to meet someone or something that brings back their humanity and change their ways. The bad guys are there, up to their normal power and greed shenanigans. Side characters show up until they aren’t useful and are gone - with different but mostly mediocre levels of building anything out of them. One set of baddies has a past with our lead, and the doctor character has a slight attempt at being more than just an information broker doctor, but nothing here entirely comes off as super deep or elaborate characters, especially if you’ve already watched a lot of movies. This is kind of the case for me, where immediately three or four other movies come to mind, but also the main reason where I don’t immediately just dismiss it for not being as good as the best examples of it.
Costumes get to have some pretty diverse action. The most outlandish being the crop of bounty hunters, ranging everywhere from borderline begger rags to big old monks, period magistrates, and a cool bow chick that’s got a cool robed spiritual ninja hunter look that also stands out from a lot of everyone else because it’s all white instead of the more prominent darker colors. With that comes a wide variety of weapons, from curved swords to big staffs, bows to hand and boot claws, and of course even a named sword that snazzy as heck. The settings pretty period, which is at least something a bit more unique feeling than just present day stuff, but also triggers my hard time telling apart feudal Japan and Chinese streets. At least when some armor comes on screen I can still lodge a pretty educated guess as to where I’m looking at, so I must be improving in some manner to that regard.
The action is the main thing that got this added to my watch list. Martial arts flicks, regardless of how fantasy-infused they are, tend to draw me in like a dog to treats. It’s pretty good here, with plenty of close in stuff, but also with enough of those weightless slides across floors and launching from walls that it’s a bit more exciting than just a normal fight - not that anything is wrong with those. The camera is pretty good and doesn’t require a million cuts to make anything coherent, although it does like to dramatically wind around the environment for different angles and selling some of the hits. Later on we also get some slow motion shots as well. It’s not graphically violent, but it is people getting cuts and a few decapitations and the likes.
Audio is balanced fine, but like I mentioned before I can’t really speak to line deliveries. Plenty of suitable thumps and schwings backing up the action on scenes though, so it feels pretty well developed. There was a few times where the music would kick in and I’d groove a little with it, but nothing so dramatic that it’s stuck with beyond the credits. Beyond that, typical soundtrack role, typical soundtrack performance. For the thinking folk the basics like morality, greed, justice and revenge, power corrupting, all that kind of stuff is there. I’m sure there’s more that could be said about the theoretical time period, or something about what a person would do for survival and the likes, but I was more here for the action then to think hard and I’ve mentioned plenty enough my brain is usually on autopilot when it comes to watching movies.
It isn’t the most unique story, and there’s probably better versions of this movie out there - but quite honestly there’s also more than likely worse version out there too. I’d call it a solid middle ground sort of movie - I don’t regret watching it, had a couple of laughs and “ow!”s during fights, and I wasn’t groaning about how bad any of it felt so to me it’s not nearly as bad as some of the reviews I quick-glanced at over on IMDB. The ending is pretty hardcore sequel bait, of which I don’t know if it got one or not, but it’s far from being the worst movie I’ve ever watched. Heck, that dumb gator movie I watched earlier this year was worse than this movie for sure, and I could actually understand the dialogue in that! Come for the action and stomach a little reading and you’ll probably get enough out of it to have a good time.