From Andrew Lau, the acclaimed director of Infernal Affairs and Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, comes an action period piece featuring some of the craziest weapons you’ve ever seen in a film titled The Guillotines.
A secret brotherhood known as The Guillotines were once favored and used by the emperor to assassinate enemies of the state using their ferocious flying guillotine. After returning from a mission to capture a political adversary named Wolf (Xiaoming Huang) who wants to bring equality between Manchu and Han Chinese, The Guillotines must set out to capture him again after he escapes. After the escape, the forward thinking Emperor decides that the brotherhood is no longer effective and sends his soldiers armed with firearms to take down both Wolf and The Guillotines, erasing the violent stain from his legacy and putting down a potential rebellion at the same time. It’s up to Leng (Ethan Juan), the leader of The Guillotines, to help himself and his brothers survive as they get trapped between Wolf’s civilian fighters and the bullets of the emperor led by his emperor brother, Haidu (Shawn Yue).
What I really appreciated the most about the film was that, for the most part, it was all practical. Everything, including the action was rooted in reality. There were no flying chases with the use of wire work or magicians popping up out of nowhere, the only object that wasn’t practical and very fairytale oriented was the actual flying guillotine weapon and the way it not only flew through the air but the way it automatically rotated like a saw without anything to propel it, but at least it was extremely bad ass.
I came into this movie expecting a lot of action, more so than story, and I got mixed results. There aren’t really any effective battles outside of the first 10-20 minutes or so, in fact rather than people getting beaten up there are simply massacres and by massacres I mean mass executions. There is a lot of killing and most of it is done by guns rather than the awesome flying guillotine and that’s where the film really disappoints. Outside of the opening scene their weapons are proven to be useless against the army and their general offensive strategy goes to crap. In the context of the story this all makes sense but as an audience member I was hoping to get to see more cool action with these insane weapons.
The second half of the film loses steam and becomes much mor
e drama oriented with the focus being on Leng as he has to decide who he is and where his allegiance should stand. It’s an identity crisis that is fueled by Wolf but also leads to the destruction of the guillotines. In fact, I’m pretty sure their weapons aren’t even used in the second half of the feature. That half is dominated by guns and explosives and boy is it a massacre.
On the whole, The Guillotines wasn’t the action movie I was expecting and the action wasn’t really based around the cool weapon or even general knife fighting and martial arts that you’d expect from a period piece like this. The action was derived from chase scenes, explosives and executions which, while cool at times, ended up being something that turned me off. Furthermore, the story can test your patience thanks to its multiple sub-plots, the Asian Jesus character, Wolf, who preaches equality, and the complete and utter incompetence of the leader of The Guillotines in his ability to kill his enemies or protect his own brothers. I’d only recommend this movie if you’re a fan of Andrew Lau or want to see how the flying guillotine is portrayed in this film, if none of those interest you then I say give this one a pass.
Rating: Doesn’t live up to its cool potential thanks to the disappearance of the flying guillotine from the titular assassinating brotherhood (5.5/10)
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