Tsui Hark’s The Blade isn’t so much a revisionist take on a Shaw Brothers wuxia as a distillation of the critiques embedded in the genre’s most popular classics.

It doesn’t diminish those that came before and certainly not those that have released since, but it does inspire audiences to re-evaluate the way in which wuxia tales create confinement in their reinterpretation ...

Damn does [Tsui] Hark seem to have something to say here, and he says it loud with every frame.

After his literal descent into a hellish landscape, Ding-on convalesces and hones a deadly, Tasmanian Devil-like technique.