Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Brotherhood of Blades Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 10, 2015

Tous pour un, un pour tous. That famous epigram helped to make The Three Musketeers invincible, but as Brotherhood of Blades shows, standing up for your compatriots can be a tricky business at times. The film is a thrilling if perhaps overly complex look at events which overtook China around 1627, when an incoming emperor decided it was best to rid the palace (and countryside) of a sect of eunuchs who had been employed as a kind of secret police. A coterie of so-called Imperial Assassins is sent out across the land to round up the eunuchs, including their leader Wei Zhong Xian (Shih-Chieh Chin), but a multilayered conspiracy with ever changing allegiances pits various factions against each other, to the point that three focal Imperial Assassins aren’t quite sure if they’re actually fighting on the same side or not. Brotherhood of Blades is a refreshingly literate take on a number of wuxia tropes, as if the Shaw Brothers were being seen through a post-modern prism. Filled with the expected amount of great fight choreography (with little if any wire work, and instead lots of flashy swordplay), Brotherhood of Blades offers an intricately woven tale that takes a bit of concentration to fully unpack, especially with a series of backstabbings (both literal and figurative) tending to repaint events in a new (bloody?) light at several key moments throughout the film.

The opening 15 minutes or so of Brotherhood of Blades offers a head spinning array of characters and situations, though the basic setup is at least detailed in some text as the film gets going. It’s 1627, and an infamous “eunuch clique” (as the film terms it) has found itself on the outside of imperial power looking in for the first time in some two hundred or so years. Layer upon layer of governmental and military bureaucracy seem to have their own agendas, and caught in the middle as veritable pawns are three Imperial Assassins, Shen Lian (Chang Chen), Jin Yichuan (Ethan Li) and Lu Jianxing (Wang Qianyuan). Each of these three has their own somewhat convoluted backstory which is quickly detailed early on and which then informs much of the tricky plot.

Shen Lian has a kind of unrequited love for young imperial brothel girl Miaotong (Liu Shishi), though it appears to be a chaste, platonic situation, at least thus far. Shen Lian is desperately trying to come up with enough cash to buy Miaotong’s freedom, but even the girl seems consigned to a life as a courtesan, since her particular station in life requires special dispensation to achieve freedom, even with copious bribes. Meanwhile, Shen Lian passes along a little of his hard earned cash to Yichuan, who is being blackmailed by a former partner in crime —literally. It turns out Yichuan is not actually Yichuan, but a thief who has assumed the identity of an Imperial Assassin in a probably risky gambit to achieve some measure of respectability. Meanwhile Jianxing is dealing with a scheming superior who promised him a promotion for (again) suitable bribes. Unfortunately for Jianxing, the silver he’s been able to come up with so far has not greased the wheels for any career advancement.

When new head of the secret police Zhao (Nie Yuan) seemingly plucks these three out of obscurity at random to capture and kill Wei, the trio feel like perhaps their destinies are in their own hands for the first time. They actually do manage to track Wei down, but in a discursive sequence which hints at a number of deals being made quickly in somewhat panicked circumstances, Shen Lian perhaps sets the trio up for epic failure. Director Lu Yang plays with the timeline in Brotherhood of Blades from the first sequence, often injecting momentary flashbacks to supposedly clarify what’s really going on, a strategy that can be momentarily confounding at times. That tends to be the case here as well, where the showdown between Shen Lian and Wei is not all it seems to be. Later, when it’s revealed that Zhao himself may be under Wei’s sway, Lu Yang takes much the same discursive course, preferring to refer to events and situations rather than explicitly detailing them on screen.

Brotherhood of Blades’ tendency to reveal strata of corruption and entanglements between various characters is perhaps its biggest stumbling block (I actually rewatched the opening 45 minutes or so of the film after my first viewing, just to make sure I had all the ins and outs of various betrayals and circumlocutions properly understood). But offsetting the proclivity for at least momentary confusion is a breathless pace and some nicely done action set pieces. The final half hour or so of the film contrasts huge battles that each of the three focal assassins are involved individually. Perhaps surprisingly, there’s less of a hodgepodge feeling here, as Lu Yang wisely skips from scene to scene at various moments to build an overall momentum that is ultimately wrenching. In fact the body count in this film ultimately reaches near Hamlet proportions.

Brotherhood of Blades was evidently shot on what amounts to a shoestring budget for this sort of historical action “epic.” That tends to show in things like CGI laden establishing shots and a certain minimalism in the production design. But the film’s blistering narrative is its strongest asset and helps to overcome any stumbles a lack of huge budgets entails. The “history” on display here is probably fairly fanciful, but the film’s smart detailing of moral shades of gray in virtually all of its main characters certainly is as relevant today as it evidently was back in the Ming Dynasty.

Brotherhood of Blades Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Brotherhood of Blades is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. I can find no online data to support this contention, but it sure looks like at some point this may have been conceived of as a 3D presentation, for the film is full of "in your face" effects like swords or other objects flying directly at the screen (see screenshot 7). Quite a bit of the film is dark and shadowy, as befits it tale of encircling conspiracies, and while there's at least decent shadow detail most of the time, there's not an abundance of it in several key sequences. More brightly lit scenes pop incredibly well, though, with lustrous hues seeming to erupt from the frame at times. Reds and blues are especially vibrant (the reds in Miaotong's brothel suite are especially notable, as are the reds that the imperial courtiers wear late in the film). Fine detail is often superb in close-ups, revealing things like the satiny sheen of many costumes or tufted elements on some of the furniture. There has been the requisite amount of color grading here, with a lot of the action scenes playing out in hues of blue. Some of the CGI elements look quite soft in comparison to the bulk of the presentation. There are no issues with image instability and aside from some passing banding, no major compression artifacts to report.

Brotherhood of Blades Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Brotherhood of Blades features both DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks in Mandarin and English. The English dub mimics the original's sound design and good immersion, but the voice work is pretty lackluster and not especially well matched to lip movements. The original language track is the way to go here unless subtitles are a major obstacle. The film is filled with great sound effects and there's excellent placement throughout the surround channels in the bustling action scenes. Dialogue and score are both offered very clearly and cleanly, with no problematic pops, cracks or dropouts. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is extremely wide.

Brotherhood of Blades Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:36)

Brotherhood of Blades Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Brotherhood of Blades has an unapologetically dense plot which does require a bit of attention to be paid to it, even as a cartwheeling series of action set pieces interrupts it with some regularity. Despite what was reportedly a fairly small budget, the film is often rather opulent looking, with good sets and costumes. But it's the interesting multilayered story and the interconnected characters that really make Brotherhood of Blades a briskly entertaining re-visioning of time honored wuxia tropes. Technical merits are very strong, and Brotherhood of Blades comes Recommended.