Butterfly and Sword - Pitching Woo Between Disembowelments

Jul

12

Butterfly and Sword - Pitching Woo Between Disembowelments

≡ Category: Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Movie Reviews By Country, Recommended |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Martial Arts
Director: Michael Mak
Year: 1993

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Butterfly and Sword never truly gels as a cohesive work of art, but the separate parts are entertaining enough in and of themselves that I can recommend it. One thing for sure, it isn’t dull.

For one thing, the violence is quite vicious. In the opening scene, a face is lopped off. People end up impaled on any number of sharp objects, are ripped into three or four pieces, have limbs shorn off, or are decapitated with alarming frequency.

The most frequent dispenser of this mayhem is none other than Michelle Yeoh, who plays Lady Ko, one of the good guys(!) She is a member of the Happy Forest clan. (You can laugh now.)

So, why is Lady Ko filleting martial artists at such an alarming rate? It seems that the ailing leader of the Happy Forest Clan, Eunuch Li (Chang Kuo-Chu) has instructed Lady Ko to intercept a scroll which outlines a plan by the Elite Villa clan to eliminate the Happy Forest Clan so they can control the world of martial arts. To obtain the scroll, she will have to kill Lord Suen (Elvis Tsui), the leader of the Elite Villa clan, and lots of other people as well.

Somehow, Michelle Yeoh’s expression, which radiates intelligence, decency and a Buddhist sense of calm, is inconsistent with her character’s bloodthirsty nature. Michelle Yeoh does better with the sequences where Lady Ko is pining for Meng Sing-Wan (Tony Leung).

Yes, Butterfly and Sword is not only a hyperbolically violent wuxia tale, it is also a story of romance and unrequited love. You see, Meng Sing-Wan is having a love affair with Butterfly (Joey Wang, she of the chipmonk cheeks). They spend a lot of time swinging through the trees on vines ala Tarzan and Jane or bantering with and teasing each other.

Last but not least, Yip Cheung (Donnie Yen) is mooning after Lady Ko, who of course has no romantic interest in him. Yip Cheung seeks advice for the lovelorn from Butterfly, who remarks that his problem is that he never smiles. When Yip Cheung attempts to smile, Butterfly changes her mind, noting that Yip Cheung’s smile is scarier than his frown.

These lovely, tranquil, and amusing scenes of a romantic nature are interspersed with slaughters of astonishing brutality. There is little or no attempt to integrate the two, which makes Butterfly and Sword less than great, but doesn’t diminish it’s entertainment value too much. In fact, the juxtaposition of these radically different moods is unintentionally funny, at least to me.

How much you enjoy the action elements of Butterfly and Sword will depend on your tolerance of wire-fu. (If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably don’t have much of a problem with the mayhem.) If you are the sort of person who can’t stand wuxia movies where people fly around, this won’t be your cup of blood. The fights, by action choreographer Tony Ching Siu-Tung, while quite creative and imaginative (check out the human bow and arrow, for example), can happen so quickly that they can be difficult to follow, although director Michael Mak makes the gory results crystal clear, which compensates somewhat. Tony Ching Siu-Tung is also wise enough to include some impressive ground fighting and swordplay — a good thing too, if you’re going to have wonderful martial artists like Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen in your cast.

So, if you don’t mind frenetic bloodletting, romantic canoodling, and jarring tonal shifts every few minutes, Butterfly and Sword should amuse you. To make the whole schizophrenic experience complete, Michelle Yeoh sings a sentimental Cantopop ballad over the credits. Enjoy.