Review: ‘Blades of the Guardians’ brings Wuxia to the Fury Road
2026 / Dir. Yuen Woo-ping
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: people fighting with swords inside a sand tornado, people fighting while their swords are on fire in an oil field, people fighting with swords everywhere!
Thanks to films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, and Kill Bill, western audiences in the 2000s were flooded with kung-fu and wuxia films from China. It was a great time to be a teenager. Nowadays, martial arts films will trickle in here and there to Netflix, but it’s nothing like the days when you could go to the movie theater and see something incredible like Hero or head to Blockbuster to pick up Once Upon a Time in China. Yuen Woo-ping, the legendary director and fight choreographer who worked on those first three films, hopes to bring back the energy of classic wuxia sword-fighting films with his latest, Blades of the Guardians.
Relying on actors trained in heavy stunt work and filmed in harsh desert conditions, Blades of the Guardians attempts to thread the needle between the classic wuxia style and modern sensibilities. With some definite nods to Mad Max: Fury Road and John Wick, there’s a real feeling with the multitude of insane, badass stunts and fight scenes to prove “we’ve still got it.” At 80 years old, this could very well be Yuen Woo-ping’s final film—let’s hope not, there’s definitely a setup for a sequel here—but Blades can act as both a fitting capstone to the signatures of his career while introducing new audiences to everything that’s made wuxia films awesome for over 50 years.
The film’s plot will feel pretty familiar to anyone who has seen these types of movies before, while also bringing in a lot of classic western elements to pair with its Chinese desert setting (a middle section is essentially an abbreviated version of Stagecoach). Dao Ma (Wu Jing) is a dressed-in-black bounty hunter traveling with a little kid who would rather compel criminals to pay him triple their bounty for him to leave them alone (after he roughs them up a bit). To oversimplify a plot with a lot of characters and competing factions, he runs afoul of the local ruler of a dead town (basically an opportunity for Jet Li to make a badass cameo) and ends up having to transport a revolutionary leader across the desert with a ragtag group while an army of clans, bounty hunters, angry ex-fiancées, and basically everyone in the world wants to kill them.
Though it can take a while to make sense of all the different machinations at play, Woo-ping strikes the right balance of letting characters breathe while not waiting too long before the next ridiculous fight scene that one-ups what came before it. There is literally everything in this movie: breakneck, hand-to-hand fighting, daring horse chases, flaming sword duels, duels in sandstorms, you name it. Though the photography, with its sleeker, more modern sensibility, took me a minute to get used to, I truly felt a childlike giddiness watching Yuen Woo-ping continue to push the limits of what a martial arts film could be.
With a massive cast and grand desert vistas, this is the wuxia genre on an epic scale and should deliver anything a fan wants, while inviting newcomers thanks to its familiar adventure and western tropes. If nothing else, please let me repeat: two guys fight each other while flying through a dust tornado. Hell yeah!