Reign Of Assassins

Su Chao-pin

The story: The Black Stone is a group of highly skilled assassins led by the shadowy Wheel King (Wang Xueqi). After tracking down half of a mystical monk’s bodily remains, rumoured to contain the secret to becoming all-powerful, one of the killers, Drizzle (Kelly Lin), disappears. Years later, a woman, Zeng Jing (Michelle Yeoh), turns up in town and sets up a stall selling fabric. She catches the eye of a messenger, Jiang Asheng (Jung Woo Sung), but her secret past casts a shadow over their lives.

Everything new is old again. Reign Of Assassins is a period martial arts flick that takes a few recent ideas and gives them an antiquated makeover. Some of it is fun, such as watching a bank robbery in progress. We are so familiar with hold-ups from TV shows and crime thrillers that it is refreshing to see it take place with swords in olden China.

The transformation works less well in some other cases. In the action series Nikita, no-hopers at the end of their tether are trained to be assassins. Here, murderous nymphomaniac Ye Zhanqing (an unconvincing Barbie Hsu) is saved from the gallows and taken under the Wheel King’s tutelage to replace Drizzle.

Plastic surgery? Criminals nowadays might go under the scalpel to change their features but that is nothing compared to the extraordinary Doctor Li, who manages to turn Kelly Lin, as Drizzle, into Michelle Yeoh (below), as the seemingly demure cloth-seller Zeng Jing. What is more unsettling, though, is that the 48-year-old Yeoh gets saddled with the voice of a sweet young girl in the Mandarin dub.

Apart from some familiar plot devices, there are also echoes of producer John Woo’s work in Reign, even though Taiwanese Su Chao-pin is credited as the director. The nip-tuck routine recalls Woo’s flamboyant Hollywood thriller Face/Off (1997) while the slo-mo swordfight and freeze frames bring to mind his penchant for showy action scenes.

Still, the fight scenes are tightly executed and Su keeps things interesting by giving the characters different signature weapons, from Zeng Jing’s flexible blade to the Wheel King’s sword which has a rotating wheel attached to it.

What Su also brings to the table is a script with a strong female protagonist underpinned by Buddhist precepts about forgiveness and letting go, both unusual for the martial arts genre as the recent spate of Donnie Yen flicks would attest to.

Yeoh brings a reserved dignity to the role and there is a homely sweetness to her relationship with Jung, recently seen in the Korean western The Good, The Bad And The Weird (2008). But it does not surpass her turn in Lee Ang’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), no matter what Woo claimed at the press conference in Singapore.

As for the remains of the monk, it is a MacGuffin that sets off the chain of events that unfolds but Su has a sly joke up his sleeve when we finally find out why the Wheel King has been searching for it all this time.

It feels a little like a missed opportunity, since a martial arts flick steeped in black humour would indeed have been something new.

(ST)