Seven Swords

Extremely messy. With a two and a half hour runtime I was expecting more complex characters and narrative cohesion. Despite the long runtime, everything feels surface level at best and disjointed or even confusing at worst. I doubt the supposed 4-hour cut enhances the enjoyment level but it likely at least clears up the narrative throughline. There are plenty of cool moments throughout the swordfights but the action feels lesser than the sum of its parts. Too much post-slow-motion and stock SFX

Very pretty and well shot with some decent choreography sprinkled about. The final showdown was impressive, shame it took 2 and a half hours of general nonsense to get there.

The story is based on serialized old wuxia novels. As with all stories like this they long history with chinese audiences. Don't worry if it didn't make sense. Movie was cut to make it releasable in the cinemas. At 153 minutes the film feels over long for a standalone film, but rumors speak of a 4 hour epic original cut. That was never released. I think of it as an homage to Seven Samurai. Donnie Yen is great, great swordplay and scenery. An honorable failure from Tsui Hark.

- 12/4/13

This film is a bit of a mess. Its pace is meandering and wildly uneven, which I suspect is due to the amount of cuts made to get it down to its still-too-long run time. Some characters and their stories are left feeling too thin, while other moments take far more screen time than needed. However, typical of Tsui, the movie is absolutely gorgeous - the lighting and colour are wonderful, and the choreography is good, too. It's almost worth seeing just to look at the opening scene's vivid reds.

Seven Swords has some fantastic swordplay, magnificent scenery, interesting drama, and maybe about 25 minutes more on its runtime than it should.

To think this was going to be four hours. Christ...

Usually a bad sign when I'm reading the wikipedia article during the movie to try to figure out what the hell is going on.

Messy, over-long and not particularly well-choreographed, this Hark Tsui-directed martial arts epic made very little sense to me. The actors, as usual, gave it their best, however.

It's a very dissapointing experience. An example of when you shouldn't let a nice DVD-cover or huge-ass poster get your expectations too big. And then it is more than 2 and a half hours, without anything that legalises that sufficiently.

Opening, intriguing, obtaining that which is needed to triumph, a little too easy, but is later rectified. The conclusion was a little open-ended, probably because they wanted to make a sequel. Overall, passable story with some interesting fight scenes.

ger; [Die Sieben Schwerter]; (guter soundtrack)

OK movie. Some good action.

Action scenes are few and far between for myself. Watchable.

Gorgeous film, with a huge cast and awesome fight choreography. If only the story made a lick of sense.