Fantastic!

Disappointment for a huge fan!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A film that can only fully be appreciated when watched with a friend. From the poor dubbing, to the tangled 'plot' this film really is a standout example of how not to make a picture.The moment I realised that this film experience was an unusual one was that after half an hour of watching the film - my friend turned to me asking "what is her name?". The woman in question was one of the main antagonists of the film who had had a great deal of screen time. She was for the rest of the film known as scary panda lady.This film had originally been 4 hours long (seeing as it had stopped being funny a good half hour before the end of this 2.5 hour bum-numbing experience, I dread to think of that potential experience), but was cut down to 2.5 hours and unfortunately, you can tell. From frame to frame there are obvious omissions leading to an end product where between frames mystery strangers or major characters simply appear, and the characters can fall asleep in one place waking up in a totally different location wearing different clothes. Overall, it's really quite an astounding watch.So please do not buy this full price. I am the fourth owner of my copy, as it has been handed from person to person in a desperate attempt at getting rid of it. If I was to run a pub quiz, my prizes would be thus: 1st prize: One copy of seven swords. 2nd prize, two copies.

This is a great martial arts film that could probably qualify as just a good film in general.It has interesting characters, a decent plot line, some great cinematography, and excellent fight and battle scenes. For those who hate the wire-fu genre, don't worry. They sacrifice the acrobatics here for some real gritty action, lots of blood and guts flowing with every severed limb, gouged eyeball, and decapitated head.The characters of the "Seven Swords" are dominated by Lai Ming, Donnie Yen and Charlie Yeung. The other ones are there but have much less significant roles. The design and use of the swords they use are quite remarkable. I really liked the secret to Charlie's sword.The plot line with the Korean mistress was a bit of a misdirect but it did play an important part of the story and gave Donnie a chance to try speaking Korean.The ending was the one disappointing part. You can see the director/writing wanting to do a sequel so badly. But alas, it never came to pass (yet).8/10

Wow. This film starts out so well and ends up sssooooo wrong! The opening sequences of the film are painfully violent and beautifully filmed, suggesting that we are in for a ride through the mythic landscape of an ancient warring China. Theis promise starts to slip away during a journey to the Mountain of Heaven t find the fabled swordsmen there, when the continuity begins to crumble. Well, Chinese narratives tend to have somewhat different sense of continuity than those in the West, so I continued to hope for the best. There followed a nice fight sequence to save a village threatened by an Imperial army. There was a pretty decent follow-up as the swordsmen met the army in its own lair.Perhaps the film should have ended there, because it went straight to hell thereafter.The middle is entirely muddled with turgid, and for the most part unnecessary, dramatics and melodramatic plot twists. Donnie Yen's character especially gets convoluted beyond recognition. The villain remains fascinating throughout, but he seems to have wandered in from another film, "Burning Paradise," and he keeps looking for the director of that great film, Ringo Lam, who unfortunately never shows up.The film never recovers, and the grand finale is wholly unsatisfying.The problem seems to be a failure on director Tsui's part to decide whether he wants to make a realistic epic or a grand operatic myth. Lam, in "Burning Paradise," was able to merge the two only because he allowed the conventions of the martial arts film to determine the limits of the realism of his depiction of the myth. Thus the characters and their actions retain a larger-than-life feel throughout the grisliest realism in the depiction of the violence.But Tsui's characters never rise to the level of the myth of their origins. Thus they feel limited not by convention but by physics and psychology. That might work in another film; while watching the final fight between Honglei Sun's villain and Donny Yen, I was reminded of the brilliant duel between Yen and Jet Li in another Tsui Hark film, "Once Upon a Time in China II." But the contest in "Seven Swords" seems so small in comparison; we feel no investment in the character of either fighter here.Such a promise, so poorly realized!

This was my first taste of the director Tsui Hark's work and, considering the man's reputation, I can only assume I picked one of his duds as an introduction to his CV. The sublime, painstaking craftsmanship is plain to see in every frame – the film is astonishingly beautiful – but it's so very, very dull. And somehow, when you consider the fact you have a world-class director, a 'Seven Samurai' story, martial arts and violence, the suspicion arises that someone is guilty of pulling off a monumental blunder because, with ingredients like that in the pot, it's surely easier to produce a juicy delight than it is to make a tasteless stew like this.Apparently the film was originally intended to be four hours long – I don't even want to think about that – which is probably where the problem lies. Cut anything in half and it just isn't going to be the same, whether it's a film, a foot or a stupefied viewer's attention span. Characters seem to be arbitrarily introduced into the plot with no unique personalities and no back-story, making it nearly impossible to tell them apart. And if you can't identify the characters you're watching, you can't identify with them on any level, so you don't become involved in their plight. Only Honglei Sun, as the unfortunately named Firewind, a villain with a snigger like Dick Dastardly's sidekick Muttley, strikes any sparks.