A Tsui Hark movie in 3-D — not to mention the first wuxia film to be shot in the format — ought to serve up three times the spectacle of the usual Tsui affair. And damned if Flying Swords of Dragon Gate doesn’t almost deliver.
In technical terms, Flying Swords features some of the most gorgeous 3-D effects of any live-action film yet made, James Cameron’s Avatar included. It’s the storytelling and characterization that fall short: Even for a movie that sits squarely in a genre known for its complicated plots, Flying Swords is ultra-cluttered with narrative details, and its most charismatic figures — including a character played by the marvelous Jet Li — get lost in the whirl.
The trick is to let yourself swoon into the picture’s visual embrace and not get too hung up on its myriad sticky plot points. Li shows up early on, in the movie’s magnificent opening sequence, set in a shipyard: His character, a shadowy crusader and stalwart defender of peasants, swoops down seemingly from nowhere to rescue a group of perceived traitors from the clutches of a government despot (played deliciously, if all too briefly, by wuxia legend Gordon Liu).
Li does away with the wily villain amid a symphony of swirling robes and high-kicking limbs, and after a great show of slashing, slicing and dicing. But meanwhile, an even stronger group of adversaries gathers elsewhere: A nasty eunuch (Chen Kun) sets off to find and kill a pregnant palace maid (Mavis Fan) who has been taken under the protection of a butt-kicking, flute-toting female warrior (Zhou Xun).
He tracks them to a desert inn — wuxia fans will recognize it as a version of the famed Dragon Gate Inn, from King Hu’s 1966 picture of the same name — where a fierce Tartar princess with an extravagantly tattooed face (Kwai Lun-mei) is already holding court. A bandit girl (Li Yuchun) and her mild-mannered sidekick — who coincidentally looks just like the nasty eunuch (both are played by Kun) — also drop in.