"KEEP BUSTIN'."

The Guillotines

tn_guillotinesTHE GUILLOTINES isn’t a remake of MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE, but it uses the same concept of the Emperor having an elite squad of ruthless executioners who use the flying guillotine to do his bidding/beheading. If you thought this was a far-fetched weapon when it was a ring of blades that popped out of a collapsible basket on the end of a chain, wait until you see the post-steampunk version.

In the opening we see the Guillotines (or really the team of digital FX artists) demonstrate their skills in Zack Snyderian slo-mo detail. They have ornate metal rings (like that thing Xena threw) that spin on the end of a curved sword that they hold like a jai alai basket. They pose and let it menacingly chunk chunk chunk until they toss it. It can curve around, ricochet and ring around some motherfucker’s collar and then the machinery dramatically clicks and chings for a while before the blades fold and pop out and cut off the head.

Of course the camera whooshes inside and through the mechanisms. There’s so much fetishism for the sounds and workings of this impossible weapon that it’s like the original flying guillotine had a baby with a teaser trailer for a Michael Bay TRANSFORMERS sequel. But in a good way though.

It makes sense that this was released in 3D somewhere.
It makes sense that this was released in 3D somewhere.

The Guillotines are a tight-knit group, they consider themselves brothers because they’ve all gone through the same thing, chosen as children to train and live deprived lives, forbidden to know how to read or write, which is supposed to assure their loyalty. Their leader is Musen (Yuchun Li, FLYING SWORDS OF DRAGON GATE), the Emperor’s daughter. He regrets not having a male heir, but she’s a badass and the others accept and respect her as a brother. So it’s a conflict for them when she’s taken hostage and he announces that she is dead to him and they are to go collect her body if possible. A cold-blooded way to make a hostage situation easier to deal with.

The abductors are a rebel group called The Herders, led by Wolf (Xiaoming Huang). This guy is suspiciously Jesus-like: peaceful, long hair, beard, robe, many followers, heals the sick (with medicine and sweet potatoes), even (SPOILER) sacrifices himself for the people, but using the execution methods you would expect in this movie.

Holy shit, you know what this is? This is a gritty reboot of the New Testament! They moved the location around and fudged the dates and stuff but this is true to the original character. A good way to introduce Him to younger audiences. I was worried they were gonna make Him a Jesus who kicks the other cheek instead of turning it, but the worst he does is get a crowd riled up in a Morpheus-style cave speech.

I like the way the names of the two groups lay out the conflict here. A guillotine is a way for a rich and vicious regime to execute their enemies. These guys are human weapons. And their enemies are herders – peasants, people who work for a living, get dirty, get paid little. But also the herding could represent the people moving in concert, working together. We find that Wolf runs a commune, an isolated farm community run by the refugees. They work, the children play, they all smile and say hello. This might be communist propaganda come to think of it but hey, seems like a nice place to live.

This is directed by Andrew Lau of INFERNAL AFFAIRS trilogy fame, so there is a mole, and everybody feels horribly betrayed, because they’re brothers, etc. Unfortunately for me it also means that it’s one of these martial arts period fantasies that’s more about feeling heavy and serious than delivering the goods. The battles are fine, but they abandon the over-the-top weaponry after the opening, there is no memorable choreography and slo-mo is more often used for Exotic Wailing Sound melodrama than for emphasis of movement or impact.

The biggest sin in my book is that the climactic battle leaves one Guillotine to protect the village with the one remaining guillotine, and then (BIG SPOILER) she gets shot before she even draws the thing. Yeah, cool point bro, but I’m the kind of viewer that would rather see a fun movie about the use of these fanciful weapons you made up instead of a lecture about how they’d be useless against guns. But I mean thanks for the information, I will remember it if I ever am in an alternate past where those weapons exist and then I am gonna try to use them when the enemy has guns.

At least it should be a more literal illustration of the concept that the guillotine’s range is only 10 paces. Put the bad guy at 11 paces.

Admittedly the guillotine is used for an effective (off-screen) dramatic climax, and hats off for the (SPOILER) satisfied smile on Wolf’s severed head as it’s held up to end the conflict between the Han Chinese and the Manchurians. This is a pretty good movie, but you should know what you’re getting into in case you’re like me and would prefer the type of movie where the Guillotines are left alive as a Qing dynasty A-Team, masterless nomadic badasses, exotically armed spaghetti western anti-heroes. Instead it’s the type of movie where they all die tragically and then some heavy text pretends to tell you the important effect these people who clearly did not exist had on history.

I guess the One-Armed Boxer himself, Jimmy Wang Yu, appears in it, but I didn’t realize it was him.

Anyway, I look forward to the Scorsese version.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2014 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Action, Martial Arts, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

6 Responses to “The Guillotines”

  1. The Original... Paul

    March 18th, 2014 at 3:49 am

    “Anyway, I look forward to the Scorsese version.”

    *Darth Vader* NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

    Anyway, I think there are questions that need to be answered here before I’m sold on seeing this film. For example:

    1) Could the guillotines be sentient? Is there a possibility of a sci-fi sequel where they turn on their masters?

    2) Is it just me, or does it sound like Wolf is the hero, not the villain? Honestly if there’s a “terrorist” who’s trying to take down a dictatorial society run by people who use giant circular weapons of torture / death to subdue their enemies, my sympathies would probably be with the terrorist.

    3) On a more serious note, the mole subplot. Look, I think I made it clear in my write-up of “Fast and Furious 6” that this really bothers me if it’s done badly. If a main character’s motivations are the opposite to what they appeared, to either the other characters or to the audience, then for me to accept it then the writers have to SELL it. Either make it a proper whodunnit to keep the audience guessing, or create tension by showing us what the mole is doing and what he or she is going through emotionally (this is a good 50% of the reason why “Infernal Affairs” is one of my favorite movies).

    So where does “The Guillotines” fall into the spectrum? Does it use its mole well for tension / mystery, or is it another case where a main character’s motivations turn out to be the exact opposite of what they’ve shown before for no good reason (well, I’m not sure that “setting up a fight between Carano and Rodriguez” counts as “no good reason”, but it sure as heck didn’t do anything for me story-wise)?

  2. The Original... Paul

    March 18th, 2014 at 4:23 am

    Also:

    “Slo-mo is more often used for Exotic Wailing Sound melodrama than for emphasis of movement or impact.”

    See, you know I was gonna pick up on that. That’s what I mean when I criticise this technique being overused. When it’s used for, say, the final blow in a climactic fight, or to highlight an emotional response (like the cop’s death in “Hard Boiled”, again) then it’s fine. Most often though I’ve found it just stops the action dead in a really overdone cheesy way, and breaks the immersion for me. Anyways…

    …Ok, so that “No!” up there might’ve been unfair. I did say I’d rewatch “The Departed”, but… I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Sorry. The last film I gave a “second chance” to (which I won’t name because I don’t want to derail this thread before anybody else has even commented in it), I went from thinking it was just boring, pretentious and over-stylised on first viewing years ago, to actively hating everything about it on second viewing. I’m not putting myself through that again.

    I love “Infernal Affairs” anyway. That’s enough for me. I don’t know if I have room in my heart for the remake as well, even if I did go back to it and found I liked it better on second viewing.

  3. “Exotic Wailing Sound melodrama”

    Perfect

    -Randy

  4. Jareth Cutestory

    March 18th, 2014 at 7:09 am

    He was just a mild mannered internet film critic with a mysterious past. Until one day a freak mishap sent him to an alternate past where impossible weapons exist. Now he has to contend with more than just spambots and shoddy camera work. This summer the pen is mightier than the sword. OUTLAW STYLE. Only in theatres.

  5. Well, at least this is a perfectly good excuse for you to check out THE FLYING GUILLOTINE and its sequels FLYING GUILLOTINE 2 and VENGEFUL BEAUTY, all topnotch Shaw Bros flicks with more than their fair share of decapitations.

  6. flyingguillotine

    March 20th, 2014 at 7:23 pm

    As a representative of the Guillotine community, I would like to apologize for this film.

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