From the Pompous Thomas 2010 Review Backlog!The Warlords is a Chinese historical epic from a couple years ago that was released in the States a couple months ago. It stars Andy Lau and Jet Li, a couple of big names that have been in awesome historical epics before, so I was expecting great things. Instead, what you got here is an awkward movie that feels like it was cut down from a much longer movie... but it wasn't. Ugh.
The movie lacks substance. There's one pretty brutal action scene in the Jason Bourne shaky cam-style that takes place about a third of the way into the movie but the rest of the movie is exposition, narration, and other boring stuff. Jet Li's army conquers city after city, but we only get to see the before and after. First the generals arguing about something, then when there should be another big battle (or at least a montage!) some on-screen text will say "They captured the city" or whatever and it's back to arguing.
I guess some people will get into the betrayals and love triangle between Lau, Li and Female Love Interest (I'm pretty sure that's the character's actual name), but it wasn't enough for me. I was pretty bored the entire time.
Cost/Benefit analysis: I paid 9 bucks to see this movie and... it wasn't worth it. It might be worth 2 or 3 if you're sick of Hero and The House of Flying Daggers and need an Asian action fix, but this isn't an essential movie by any means.
Fun Note: Wikipedia says that the movie had a 40 million dollar budget. It also says that 15 million of that went to Jet Li. I wonder if that's part of the problem...
