The Warlords
The Warlords is a beautiful-looking picture that is hampered by a derivative and lazy story of three 'brothers' who help fight in a civil war in mid-19th century China. While mostly based on true events, the plot is badly paced, concentrating on early problems in the campaign. Incredibly, despite spending almost all the film looking forward to two final key battles, the first is fudged with a dodgy surrender, and even more contemptuously the second one isn't shown on screen at all! There's some murky internal politics that we're not given quite enough detail about to fully work out, so we end up not caring. And the brother-betrayal issue has been done so many times before, there's nothing really new here. Women flit in and out of the film, highly inconsequentially, so they are mainly a pointless distraction. And how on earth this film needed 8 writers - yes, count 'em, 8! - is anyone's guess.

Jet Li is decent to watch, though I'd rather see him fight with his body (The Forbidden Kingdom (my review), for example) than with swords - far more interesting. The other people in the film show wildly varying acting skills.

Looks good, but the story is boring, the battles get monotonous after a while, and the potentially most interesting battle is omitted entirely. Which isn't that good a scorecard, but I can't say I either enjoyed or hated this particularly. 4.5 out of 10.