Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

It's the early 17th Century and China's new rulers have outlawed all martial arts. Remote warlords clean up, laying bloody waste to villages of innocents, and looting as they go. The last town standing hears of the coming menace through the retired executioner Fu, who takes up with locals Wu and Han in search of the mythic Seven Swords that can save them all. Battle, romance, mysticism; it sounds great. It isn't.

Wuxia (Chinese swords-and-scorcery) has flourished in Western cinemas of late, but this is more Conan than Crouching Tiger. The supernatural ballet of battle is replaced by grunting realism, while the gorgeous colours and set-ups of Hero or Flying Daggers give way to a muggy palette and a confusion of mid-shots and fast cutaways. But the problem is in the storytelling. Reportedly, Seven Swords was cut down from four hours - and you can see the holes. Whole sequences are palpably missing, leaving the narrative in tatters, most notably where the posse gets together. One minute they are three, the next they are seven, loaded up with magical swords and riding off to save the day with no explanation ever forthcoming.

"FLAT AND OBSCURE"

Characters, aside from a couple of great value bad guys, are under-defined to the point of anonymity. Love triangles and rectangles form and disintegrate with no respect for human behaviour. Aside from a genuinely amazing final showdown in a hallway, much of the action is flat and obscure. The frustration is that something here was truly epic. We are left with not a near miss, but a colossal one.

In Cantonese with English subtitles.