More than a decade and a half ago, Peter Chan Ho Sun made his directorial debut with Alan & Eric: Between Hello & Goodbye, a romantic drama that centred on a love triangle. Love triangles also prominently figure in three of the most successful movies this filmmaker went on to make later in his achievement-filled career: He’s A Woman, She’s a Man (1994); Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996); and his last work prior to this 2007 offering, Perhaps Love (2005).

Consequently, it will not come as too much of a surprise that his latest film, The Warlords, is yet another Peter Chan film with a love triangle. But what will probably be most shocking to those with a prior knowledge of the director-producer’s filmography is how bloody, brutal, intense and serious this big budget production (which literally features a cast of thousands led by megastars Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro) is.

At the start of Chan’s hard-hitting historical epic, viewers are informed that its setting is China in the mid 19th century, when civil war and chaos claimed the lives of some 50 million people through fighting or just
plain starvation. Before we can properly grasp the
sheer magnitude of the numbers, however, we are catapulted into the thick of a raging battle that ends with the annihilation of all but one member of an army of over 1,000.

General Pang Qing-Yun (Jet Li) only survived because, as he bitterly admits to Lian (Xu Jinglei), the woman who helps bring him back from the dead with a dose of humanity and soup, “I played dead” and hid under a pile of his soldiers’ corpses until the victorious enemy left the field of battle. As the fates would have it though, his female saviour would come to be a romantic sticking point in two other valued relationships he goes on to establish in those dark days after the massacre of his army and prior to his return to the military fold. Belatedly he discovers that Lian is the wife of Zhao Er-Hu (Andy Lau), the brave bandit leader with whom he and the film’s observant narrator, Jiang Wu-Yan (Takeshi Kaneshiro), swear an oath of blood brotherhood.

At the end of the day though, romance is but a sideshow in The Warlords. The focus, instead, is very much on the male trio who go on to become generals in the newly formed Shan army that fight on the side of the then reigning – but also much reviled – Qing Dynasty, and these men’s actions in times of almost endless war; with the majority of screen time devoted to fully revealing, warts and all, the complex character Er-Hu and the younger Wu-Yan come to call “big brother”.

In addition to being involved in a lot of action scenes, Jet Li has plenty of opportunities to show how strong a dramatic actor he actually is. Two others who get to showcase their considerable talents in this film are action director Ching Siu Tung and cinematographer Arthur Wong. To sum it all up, long before this over two-hour-long movie’s final scenes unfolded, I had already seen enough to be convinced that the very impressive – if gruelling – The Warlords will be making a killing at next year’s Hong Kong film awards and at box offices throughout this region.

Yvonne Teh