Dragon Blade takes place in 48 BC. Huo An (Jackie Chan) is the captain of the protection squad, a small group of soldiers dedicated to maintaining the peace on the Silk Road, which has become the usual battleground of 36 nations. Huo An and his squad are framed and sentenced to hard labor at Wild Geese Gate. When a Roman legion led by their general Lucius (John Cusack) shows up at the gates, Huo An rises to the defense of the town. But the two soon learn that their interests are not in conflict, and they develop a friendship as they try to build cooperation between their men.
The film actually begins with one of the most unnecessary framing devices in all of cinema history. It starts in present day, following claims that the film is inspired by true events, and that archaeologists have found some evidence that Romans may have been in China and started a settlement there two thousand years ago. A pair of characters find the ruins of a city and use some sort of sci-fi device to map it out digitally. The film goes back to them later on, only to rush through a dramatic arc that wasn't there before.
This is all to say that Dragon Blade is bloated. Even before any of it really starts, it has already committed itself to an extraneous bit of storytelling that doesn't matter to the bigger picture at all. The film goes on like this, attempting to tell a much bigger story than it is actually capable of, the direction and the editing in particular failing to match its narrative ambitions. Between the unnecessary framing device, the clunky flashbacks, and a tendency to repeat shots, the movie really has trouble keeping hold of its dramatic core.
This is a big story with many component parts, but it actually drives toward a pretty simple place. This is a film that stumps for peace between men, its various plot threads all essentially banging on the same drum. The film ends up repeating itself quite a bit, its story running in circles as it tries to reconcile its predilection for action sequences with its overall theme of solidarity between men of all races. The movie ends up feeling a bit bipolar, relishing a bit too much in its capacity for depicting violence while making statements about how we all need peace.
The movie's best quality is its ability to get corny. While people will undoubtedly be seeing this for the big war sequences, there's more merit to the unabashedly sincere scenes that trace the growing friendship between the two main characters, and the sense of community that grows among the misfits of Wild Geese Gate. It all plays to old clichés, but the earnestness of these scenes is pretty winning. It is at least preferable to the fights, which largely get too close, and feature too many participants that can't keep up with Chan's action direction. The acting isn't very good, and it's all made worse by awful English dubbing. Chang's Chinese dialogue is dubbed with heavily accented and poorly translated English, making many of his scenes unintelligible.
Like so many of these recent Chinese epics, Dragon Blade could stand to be a lot simpler and shorter. This movie gets too caught up in being big that it loses sight of its sweetest qualities. Somewhere in here is a pretty simple story about peace. It may be corny, but the sentiment feels real and organic. That's more than can be said about the rest of this movie, which trades in all the meaningless excess of modern blockbuster filmmaking.
My Rating:
