Warrior: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Warrior: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 6, 2019

Bruce Lee as Grasshopper? Kung Fu became one of the perhaps more unexpected hits of early seventies television, with David Carradine portraying Caine, a half-Chinese martial arts expert (and former Shaolin priest) who arrives in the Wild West with a bounty on his head, and who is supposedly on the hunt for his missing American family members (though that particular plot element tended to take a back seat to episodic run ins with various villainous types). But if circumstantial evidence is any guide, Bruce Lee may have provided the inspiration for Kung Fu, since he was evidently pitching a series called Warrior in a span of time prior to the airing of Kung Fu, with perhaps too many similarities to the Carradine show to be considered a complete coincidence. In a way, it’s kind of interesting to think of what might have happened if either Warrior had made it to air, or if in fact Lee himself had starred in Kung Fu as Caine, since his tragic demise occurred in 1973, at the arguable height of Kung Fu’s popularity (the show would continue airing in its original broadcast run until 1975). Now several decades later Warrior has found a television home of its own, albeit in the premium pay enclave of Cinemax. The series is an often viscerally exciting tour through late 19th century San Francisco, with a focus on Chinese “tongs”, which many will probably more or less automatically translate to “gangs”, although the term is described in some supplements as more accurately meaning “club” or “social group”. That said, there’s little doubt that the tongs in Warrior have moved on from any perceived “friendly banter” to what is repeatedly referred to in this series as “scrapping”, meaning all out combat in a variety of forms.

Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) bears more than a few similarities to Caine from Kung Fu, not the least of which is his martial arts acumen, but also the fact that he’s arrived in the Wild West (or at least San Francisco, which is depicted as being pretty darn wild) in search of a family member, as well as a former girlfriend. He’s also of mixed parentage (or, more accurately, grandparentage), though this particular element isn’t overly emphasized. Ah Sahm almost instantly catches the eye of some Chinese gang members when he erupts into a martial arts fury shortly after arriving (for honorable reasons, of course), which quickly ensconces Sahm in the midst of some nascent turf wars between various tongs.

Warrior wants to exploit the same kind of novelistic approach that has informed any number of high profile historically themed series, and as such viewers need to be prepared for a labyrinthine assortment of characters and intersecting subplots. To cite just a few of these, Sahm’s sister turns out to be Mai Ling (Dianne Doan), a woman with a considerable backstory who has married a tong leader and is therefore feared and unexpectedly powerful. Young Jun (Jason Tobin) is an up and coming tong member who befriends Sahm, but whose hotheadedness gets the pair into various adventures. Ah Toy (Olivia Cheng) is a “working woman” at a local brothel who wants to ingratiate herself to Sahm due to his connections with Mai Ling. Another woman has her eyes set on Sahm, however, and she’s Penelope Blake (Joanna Vanderham), the (white) wife of San Francisco’s mayor, who gets involved with Sahm after he’s unfairly jailed after a fracas where he is actually trying to protect her. That arrest loops in already developing subplots involving a couple of policeman, hard drinking (and gambling) Irishman Bill O’Hara (Kieran Bew), who is basically decent, albeit troubled; and Richard Lee (Tom Weston-Jones), a recent transplant from the South who introduces the San Francisco police force to “newfangled” techniques in forensics.

Even that prolonged list barely scratches the surface of some of the dense content this series offers, but rather commendably the writing and directing staffs keep things generally clear, if not always unpredictable. In fact, a number of supposedly big plot developments are telegraphed (Hill or otherwise) throughout this first season, with a couple of them, including (minor spoiler alerts) a “forbidden love” angle between Sahm and Penelope, and a simultaneously unfolding tangle between Sahm and Mai Ling which ostensibly puts them on opposite sides of a burgeoning tong war, not just predictable but actually kind of rote, ultimately. That said, the series is really rather remarkably evocative at times, and it’s kind of thrilling in a way to see a “western” (which in many ways Warrior is) filled with so many Chinese characters.

The series features a nicely appointed production design which brings this era and place nicely to life, and there's also an appealing balance between character development and unabashed butt kicking proclivities, which explode with pretty regular frequency. There are a number of interesting "minor" elements here, including an emphasis on various characters attempting to free themselves from shackles of various kind, that help elevate some otherwise occasionally tawdry material.

Warrior: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Warrior: The Complete First Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO and Cinemax with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The show was shot by several different cinematographers, working in conjunction with several different directors, but I haven't been able to dredge up any technical information on the shoot (if anyone has verifiable information, private message me and I'll happily update the review). This looks digitally captured and I'm assuming it was finished at a 2K DI. As can perhaps be gleaned from several of the screenshots accompanying this review, the presentation here is kind of a "tale of two cities", namely outdoor or otherwise brightly lit material, where detail levels are typically excellent and the palette nicely burnished, and indoor or dimly lit sequences, which can often lack much fine detail and look downright murky at times. There are a number of long scenes scattered throughout this first season that have been pretty aggressively graded toward yellows and blues (as again can be made out by some of the screenshots I've uploaded), and those stylistic choices when combined with a lack of lighting can also tend to deflate detail levels. That said, generally speaking, this is a nicely sharp transfer that offers good support for the series' nice production design.

Warrior: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Warrior: The Complete First Season offers a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that expectedly delivers a glut of surround activity along with some propulsive LFE during some of the fight scenes, but which otherwise provides a lot of surround activity simply courtesy of the fact that so many scenes take place in crowded environments that have quite a bit of ambient background sounds wafting through the side and rear channels. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, though occasionally it sounded to me like some of the ethnic instruments used in the underscore were a bit hot in the overall mix.

Warrior: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc 1

• Inside the Episodes (1080p; 15:14) offers featurettes on the following episodes:

  Episode 1 - The Itchy Onion

  
  

  Episode 2 - There's No China in the Bible

  
  

  Episode 3 - John Chinaman

Disc 2

• Inside the Episodes (1080p; 13:37) offers featurettes on the following episodes:

  Episode 4 - The White Mountain

  
  

  Episode 5 - The Blood and the Sh*t

  
  

  Episode 6 - Chewed Up, Spit Out, and Stepped On

Disc 3

• Inside the Episodes (1080p; 19:41) offers featurettes on the following episodes:

  Episode 7 - The Tiger and the Fox

  
  

  Episode 8 - They Don't Pay Us Enough to Think

  
  

  Episode 9 - Chinese Boxing

  
  

  Episode 10 - If You're Going to Bow Low, Bow Low

Warrior: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's a kind of fun trivia data point linking Kung Fu and Warrior in a different kind of way than the Bruce Lee connection, and it manages to work in a perhaps arcane rule of the Screen Actors Guild that only one performer with a certain name can be registered under that name at any one time (that's one reason why Michael J. Fox was Michael J. Fox, because another Michael Fox was already registered under that name, or why Michael Keaton, who was born Michael Douglas, had to take a new surname because -- well, you can figure it out). Older readers or fans of the original Kung Fu may recall that venerable Oscar winning actor Dean Jagger ended up portraying Caine's grandfather in that series. That Dean Jagger passed away in 1991, which evidently paved the way for another Dean Jagger to be able to use that name, and that actor (evidently a Brit) portrays a character named Dylan Leary in this series. You can delight and/or amaze your friends with this fascinating bit of information as you see fit. Relationships between Kung Fu and Warrior aside, though, this series is rather distinctive from a number of angles, but it does tend to traffic in some cliches at times despite its own unique setting and glut of characters. Technical merits are solid, and Warrior: The Complete First Season comes Recommended.