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The opening credits play over sacramental scrolls (with splashes of animation), a few swift strokes set up the search for vengeance in the wake of an obliterated wedding. The young nobleman (Kong Lau) learns too late that a bride charges more for betrayal than for marriage, the family's sworn enemy (Hoi Sang Lee) crashes the celebration to claim the fortress as his own, "one killing begets another." The sacred Moonlight Sword can be wielded for virtuous purposes only, so the vendetta falls to a pair of hired blades—the seasoned fighter (Pai Wei) more concerned with tending to horses, and the sardonic scalawag (Damian Lau) who's "a top swordsman but a bad assassin." The melees range from stark duels to opulent demolition jobs, all grist for John Woo's mill: Slow motion heightens the spray of an exploding squib in an open field, later it figures in a flaming inspiration as rows of ornamental candles are incorporated into battle. The villain practices his deadly moves on his own minions under heavy rain and amid his bodyguards keeps a narcoleptic dervish who slices limbs between snores, yet the acrobatic shenanigans are undercut by a streak of melancholy that ventures beyond the tale's many double-crosses and into the genre's encroaching twilight. (The title gives just the right evocation of Fordian elegy.) Violence is for men and music is for women (cf. Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata), the ignored concubine chastely plucks the theme song as accompaniment for the real romantic scene of the two warriors planning the raid on a villa. "The making of a hero costs many innocent lives." Woo instills Chang Cheh's tutelage with his own obsessions in the operatic showdown, and ushers action cinema into the new decade. With Fung Hark-on, Chau-Wah Yim, and Bonnie Ngai.
--- Fernando F. Croce |