9 Jan - "These days, dying is easy. Living is harder"

The Warlords (2007)
dir. Peter Chan, Wai Man Yip

CAST
Jet Li (Fearless, 2006)
Andy Lau (House of Flying Daggers, 2004)
Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers, 2004)

Jet Li is the coolest name ever. Do you think he thought of that hiself? I think so, because his real name is more Chinese.

The story is abot a disgraced military commander who joins a band of robbers and convinces them to join the army under his command. The twist is while that guy (Jet Li) was supposed to be the ethical one, his own rotted sense of pride turns him into a real jerk. So when he starts out by executing two of his own soldiers for raping girls in a conquered city because, "everyone should be free," he ends up ordering an entire city of unarmed people be executed so he can hustle out of there and capture the next city, the rebel capital. As a result, the former leader of the robber band gets all moralistic and goes up against Jet's character. They're also both in love with the same girl (the only female character).

There's lots of really intense fighting, but I don't think an of the subsequent fights compared with the first, in which Jet Li gets stabed with a really long spear, but still kills a WHOLE LOT of guys, and then lets the spear run through him so he can kill the guy who's holding the spear. AND THEN HE SURVIVES!

Maybe it's the translation, but I thought this movie was a little heavy-handed with the metaphors. There's one scene where Jet Li walks out onto a crackly frozen lake, and some other guy goes, "General Pang! Be careful!" and then he says, "I have walked on thin ice all my life" End scene.

Lame! In that sense it reminds me of a book I read translated from Vietnamese. It was about the Vietnam War, and was all critically acclaimed and shit, but all I could think was, "Is he seriously comparing his life to a river???" For serious?!

I forget what it was called.