Dragon Blade
Director: Daniel
Lee
Writer: Daniel Lee
Starring: Jackie
Chan, John Cusack, Adrien Brody
Rating: Two and a
half stars out of five.
Available now on
demand.
Dragon Blade is,
in the aggregate, a poor motion picture. But it is a fascinating and
instructive one, something that can teach on one hand and enthrall
(at times) on the other. The reasons for this are more systematic and
business-oriented than purely failures of storytelling, although that
is part of the film's inability to be engaging in a sustainable
fashion. But first, there are a couple things to understand about how
it came to be before its cinematic merits can be discussed in the
proper context.
We live in a time
of massive change in the film industry. As China grows as a consumer
market, more and more movies are being made with internationalist
intent. The things that translate across culture tend to be broad,
the stuff that's easy to pick up with the naked eye without having a
strong background in another culture. That is why big action
franchises, with their focus on wordless movement and sometimes
slapstick comedy that someone from any corner of the globe can
understand, translate into massive billion dollar worldwide
successes.
Another wrinkle to
this is the shared financial burden of film production. In the past,
there would more often than not be film industries in most developed
nations, typically independent of one another – the main exceptions
to this rule applied in Europe, where companies across sovereign
nations have long co-financed films, partly because of the size and
proximity of the countries. Today, there is much more cross
pollination happening in places that have often only imported films
wholesale from other places. Part of this is due to the extreme
expense of making a modern blockbuster and partly it's because of the
desire to appeal to as many people as possible to, in turn, make
money hand over fist, usually with the lion's share of the profits
going to Hollywood studio executives. But now, thanks to all this
profit sharing, the industries in other countries have a larger piece
of the pie. They are turning around and producing their own action
spectaculars with Hollywood involvement but not necessarily
oversight.
Which brings us
back to Dragon Blade, a Chinese production that nonetheless
has a huge American and European influence (and commercial
aspiration). In many key ways, Dragon Blade serves as a
meta-narrative of cultural exchange. Its premise is that Jackie
Chan's Huo An and his well-trained band of roving
cop-warrior-security guards serve to protect the commercial
throughway the Silk Road during the Roman Empire's ascent to the
world's primary power. Indeed, it takes place right at the end of
Julius Caesar's reign, when the Republic became the Empire, another
layer of meta commentary on the combination and consolidation of
filmmaking power.
A Roman legion led
by Lucius (John Cusack) finds itself lost along the Silk Road.
Breaking their own rule, the Romans do as Romans do even when they're
not in Rome by deciding to go a'conquerin'. However, they come along
Huo An and his Silk Road Protection Squad and quickly come to an
understanding and agree to mutual protection. The Romans use their
engineering skills to help the Protection Squad rebuild a
war-decimated fortress called the Goose Gate. They find much
(everything) to admire about each other and make constant grand
gestures toward the humanistic good of collaboration and harmonious
coexistence. The movie tells us time and again how good it is to
respect and care for the cultures of those who are different from us.
And that's just it.
Dragon Blade is telling us these things. It also shows
us in no uncertain terms how it feels about cooperation and
“Kumbaya.” These are undoubtedly good things and sincerely felt
by those saying them in real life, but as storytelling it is death.
It removes internal turmoil and tries to live in a place of grace
without going through the hard work of earning gracefulness. This is
a film that, when given the choice between Occam's Razor and a heavy
rock to smash an idea to smithereens, it will always go for the
latter and think it is the former.
The growing bond
between Cusack's Lucious and Chan's Huo An makes sense on paper, even
if it is all warmed over treacle. In practice between one actor
speaking a second language (Chan) and another tasked with espousing
clumsy, easily recognizable American rhetoric (Cusack), everything
falls apart. This is due to something foreign audiences probably
complain about constantly when seeing Americanized versions of
themselves in Hollywood movies. The Chinese people making this film
do not have a firm grasp on the nuances and eccentricities of
American speech. Cusack, either through a lack of interest or under
the direction of a filmmaker who wants there to be no cross-cultural
confusion of meaning, goes into automation. His performance is not
simply wooden, it is Petrified Forest levels of inert. He is there to
explain the plot and set up the conflict, and he does nothing to
imbue it with personality or transcend the limitations of a language
barrier. He is simply a body meant to look stoic and brave while he
says things about being stoic and brave.
The conflict Lucius
is there to prepare the audience for arrives far too late to have its
full effect. Adrien Brody plays Tiberius, a striver in Roman society
who is making his play for power. He arrives to ensure there are no
other claims to his power, including his blind, prepubescent brother
who is under Lucius's care. Brody brings a quasi-naturalistic lift to
a film with its dangerously enlarged heart on its sleeve Brody's
Tiberius is a man who grows more comfortable with evil the longer he
lives with it. He mixes mustache-twirling evil and a quiet brokenness
over the atrocities he has committed to reach his perch – not to
mention the ones he plans to do in the future. But he has this
attitude of, “I've gone this far already, why not own it?”
that is exhilarating to watch, even if they arrive in short bursts
before Dragon Blade recedes into its obvious surface-level
themes.
It is a shame
Dragon Blade was not made 90 years ago, because it would have
made an excellent silent epic where the overwrought sentiments of its
script and actors could have breathed. Writer-director Daniel Lee
gives a storybook sheen to everything, an artificial golden-sepia
tone to the desert where most of it takes place. His tendencies
toward oversimplification work wonders with his use of color of
clothing to designate different races, tribes, and countries. They
can occasionally feel like a game of Starcraft, especially
during the climactic battle sequence, but visual conspicuousness has
a much more comfortable time blending into cinema than vocal or
scripted obviousness.
Where Lee trips up
on the visual cues is with his unnecessary devotion to flashing back
to things that sometimes happened mere moments before, to wipe away
any doubt that the audience did not understand what had occurred.
Sometimes the flashbacks feel as though they were extensions of the
scenes immediately before them. They could easily have been cut if
there was more trust placed in the audience's cognitive abilities.
This speaks to the international financial flavor of things, as they
cannot afford to lose one pair of eyeballs, so they make sure to
cover their bases again and again in a way that is beyond irritating
to anyone paying attention.
But Dragon Blade
loops back around to being good again in a visual sense with its
action, which is staged confidently. The 61-year-old Chan is still
spry and able to participate in the the fight scenes, even if several
of them are shot from the waist up to avoid making him move like the
madman he used to be. He retains much of his environmental awareness,
scanning the areas around him to look for weapons, both traditional
and not, in order to win so he can continue on his merry way of peace
among the humans of the world.
For the mixed bag
of sometimes joyous visual wonder Dragon Blade has to offer,
it is still a failure. It is overly concerned with checking off
audience demographic boxes than it is with telling a story
confidently. Its humanistic themes are the types of things people
should strive for, but not because a lackluster movie
condescendingly tells them to do so. For it to be more successful, it
would have to show, through begrudging, pragmatic partnerships
turning into mutual respect turning to commitment over time.
As a piece of film
history, though, Dragon Blade could be significant. Neither
Cusack nor Brody has been a big star for some time, but they remain
second fiddle to the star from Hong Kong in a movie that clearly cost
a lot of money. That is not the historical norm with these things.
The fact that the Chinese man was the center of the story and not the
valiant war-monger Roman soldier is another fascinating note. It is a
clumsy, clunky fiasco of a film, but it could very well signal the
coming trends in the financial sector of the film business in which
studios around the globe collaborate to tell simple (or simplistic)
stories on grand scales to reach audiences literally everywhere and
bring in truckloads of money. Dragon Blade may be the first
draft of a new world cinema, before filmmakers are truly able to have
a foot firmly planted in each culture they are trying to cross
onscreen. With practice, those ham-fisted exposition dumps could turn into nuanced understanding of the peoples being depicted. With any luck, future work of this variety will find the
actual grace this pretended to have.
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