Geek culture is at a crossroads, and it’s going to have to make some tough decisions. For years, the ongoing pursuit of forum troller and studio marketer alike seems to have been to produce something with an unsurpassable quotient of ‘awesome’, usually by blending together elements such as pirates, dinosaurs, robots, and zombies (this concept seems to be reaching a boiling point with this summer’s Cowboys and Aliens). As such, the fan community is kind of obligated to embrace The Warrior’s Way, one of the most ridiculous genre mash-ups to emerge from Hollywood in the last decade. Under no circumstances is it objectively a good film; the plotting is unbelievable when it isn’t clichéd, and the less said about the composite work, the better. But there’s something undeniably spunky about the way that it aggressively rejects any attempts to apply a reasonable measure of logic to its story, and its playful manipulations of genre make it seem as if the original editors of Cahiers du Cinema would have loved it. For a discerning viewer, you may be taken aback by how disarming its charms are, or you may look with horror at what fandom hath wrought.
How do we know that Yang (Jang Dong Gun) is the greatest swordsman in all of history? Because the title is displayed on screen next to him, Scott Pilgrim-style, right after he kills the guy who previously held that title. Unfortunately, he’s also the hero of the story, and we should probably like him, and thus he will not be killing that baby who happens to be the last surviving member of the rival clan. Picking up stakes and sailing to America (infant in tow), Yang takes up with the oddball misfits and circus folk of a ghost town in the wild west, most notably drunken Ron (Geoffrey Rush), Calamity Jane-lite Lynne (Kate Bosworth), and requisite little person 8-ball (Tony Cox). But the wild west has a rough way about itself too, personified in the shadowy, facially scarred form of the Colonel (Danny Huston), who terrorizes villagers for no good reason at all and happens to have killed Lynne’s parents. Naturally, it doesn’t help that the head of his own clan, Saddest Flute (Ti Lung) is making his way towards the wild west, and may be anticipating a showdown of some sort.
In the purest sense of the term, calling The Warrior’s Way a martial arts film is kind of insulting. There is very little actual martial arts in the film, and what is there is of the 300-variety: hyper-stylized, confusingly edited, and set against a backdrop that wouldn’t be convincing under the most charitable of circumstances. But Warrior’s Way doesn’t apologize for it’s reliance on the purely artificial: it embraces it. Each set-up, each color, each sashay of a physically impossible sword movement is done with such relish that it speaks not of cynical desperation but of authentic joy, not entirely unlike Fellini’s buoyant clown parades. More recently, it draws inspiration from the recent work of Zhang Yimou (Hero and House of Flying Daggers) in which actors serve as little other than components in an elaborate moving piece designed in which all narrative considerations take a backseat to aesthetic nicety.
That’s not to say that the work here is anywhere on that level, because it’s not. Frequently, the animation on display is an even bigger hindrance to the overall experience than the dialogue. But the film recognizes, intelligently, exactly where its appeal lies, and disposes of all structural obligations within the first 20 minutes. More so than any other genre film so far, The Warrior’s Way dissolves the samurai/cowboy mythos down to its barest essence, then inflates it to a kind of high art. It may not be a valuable art, but it is a direct challenge to western film-making and its casual lip service to functionally irrelevant factors like plot and character, almost as if we were all feeling Puritanically guilty about wanting to watch people pummeling each other. Way feels no such guilt, which may inspire it in others, but even if the film is a grim omen of things to come, it's unlikely that anything that follows will do so with such abandon, or with such zest for the digital canvas.
BONUS FEATURES
There are a few deleted scenes, as well as some behind-the-scenes footage.
"The Warrior's Way" is on sale June 28, 2011 and is rated R. Action. Written and directed by Sngmoo Lee. Starring Danny Huston, Geoffrey Rush, Kate Bosworth, Dong Gun Jang, Tony Cox.
