Tagline: 99 have fallen. One remains.
Curiosity: It’s been a while since I really obsessed over a kung-fu movie, and I heard good things about the Shaw Brothers.
Plot: This guy with a mustache is trying to collect 100 swords. But instead of buying them, he wants to kill dudes and take their swords. He’s building a house out of swords, you see. But when he goes to collect on his one hundredth sword, he gets defeated by this other guy. Other Guy lets Mustache Guy live, but Mustache Guy is so pissed off about it, especially when he finds out that his sensei didn’t teach him a super secret black magic fighting move. So, Mustache Guy kills his sensei and some guy’s dad, stealing both the fighting move and the most amazing sword ever in the process. It’s up to Some Guy to beat Mustache Guy, to both avenge his father’s death and to end Mustache Guy’s reign of facial hairy terror.
Thoughts: Even though it’s only 100 minutes long, Supreme Swordsman is kind of awkward to watch. Part of that is because of the subtitles. There are plenty of weird word choices – people always refer to their elders as “senior,” for example. But the movie also just jumps off halfway through and starts up an entirely other movie.
Not to get all spoilery, but most of the movie is concerned with Mustache Guy’s rise to power and Some Guy’s quest for revenge. But when it segues into Some Guy’s training, it becomes all about his misadventures, in which he takes strange Chinese herbs and tries to save a lady and even goes to hell for a bit. It’s an entirely different movie, and while it’s more satisfying than a Western training montage would have been, it still comes out of nowhere and goes on a little too long.
Then again, I didn’t buy Supreme Swordsman for the plot. I wanted to see kung-fu ‘n’ sword fights, and I got both in abundance. While the choreography is a little too clean (I prefer the primal beat downs of Bruce Lee and Tony Jaa), it still satisfied my thirst for dude-smashin’.
Reflection: Holy shit, Shaw Brothers Studio put out so many kung-fu movies.
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