The Warlords has war scenes, lots of war scenes, which makes you shocked but not exited; it tells everything about brotherhood, which makes you wondering why the brotherhood is so fragile; and it features a love triangle, which makes you wise the triangle never formed in the first place.

The story is set in the mid-19th Century. The Chinese Qing Empire was deeply corrupted and the people were suffering. The Taiping Rebellion (1851 – 1864) offered the people a hope of ending the suffering. But the Taiping regime, controlled many richest cities of China at that time, was equally corrupted and the conflict between the empire and the Taiping made the people suffered ever more.

In the beginning of story, Pang Qingyun (Jet Li), an imperial general slowly climbs out of countless corpses of soldiers from both sides. His entire battalion has been wiped out and he survives only by pretending to be dead. He wanders without direction and all he can see are starving villagers. He collapses on the road and is saved by a young woman (Xu Jinglei), who spends a night with him in an abandoned house. Just for getting something to eat, he is somehow recruited by bandit leader Zhao Erhu (Andy Lau) and his little sworn brother Jiang Wuyang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), to attack a food convoy of the Taiping. The attack is a success and upon returning to the bandits’ village, Pang bumps into that young woman again. She is in fact the wife of Zhao. Pang is not willing to give up on her and their affair haunts them toward the end of the story. Then hundreds of imperial soldiers show up and confiscate the food they have. To make their men and their family survive, Zhao and Jiang took Pang’s suggestion of joining the imperial force. They swear to be brothers for the rest of their lives and formed their own battalion to fight the Taiping.

Short on weapons and food, they quickly realized combat is the last thing they should be worrying about. Their superiors, are probably benefiting from the lasting of the war, are hesitating on giving the brothers supplies; and a rival imperial commander has no interest of assisting the brothers on the battlefield but shows full interesting of getting his hand on what the brothers are going to capture. Against all odds, the brothers advance quickly and become the favorite of the imperial court, especially Pang. As the fighting drags on, the brotherhood starts falling apart. Pang has the ambition of grabbing power and believes he can do the better good for the people if he is in control. He wants to end the war quickly in order to bring peace to the people and to do so, sometimes he is not hesitating to sacrifice lives of the innocent and do secret political deals with others. Zhao on the other hand, always looks after the interest of his men first and always believes men should be trusty and honorable. The third brother Jiang, caught in between the clashes between his two big brothers, are constantly struggling to decide who is right and who is wrong.

The Warlords started as a remake of master martial-art director Chang Cheh’s Ci Ma, but in the final print, only an outline of the original story remains. Director Peter Chan, who is known for shooting love stories, like Comrades: Almost a Love Story and Perhaps Love, made a very bold move to launch the mage-budget war movie. While the battle scenes could be handled with helps from the professionals, telling a decent story is the most difficult task. Fortunately, Chan is a very good storyteller and he does not fail us this time. The Warlords is not simply just a war movie or anti-war movie (in fact, all war movies can be considered anti-war), it is a movie about how people struggle to survive war and turmoil in their own ways. The war featured in the story is not something the good versus the evil. Most men fight the war only because they need jobs to feed themselves and their love ones, and soldiers lives are just like pieces on a board game, are tokens of warlords, who are greedy on political gain. Stopping the war is almost impossible and the only way to stop the war is to expand the war, which may lead a quick defeat of either side.

Once the cast list was announced before the shooting ever started, we knew the movie would be big. Not just because they are big names but because they are real actors. In The Warlords, Jet Li as the male lead, has his biggest breakthrough in his career. In the past three decades, Li stared in almost 40 films, all of them can be classified as martial-art or kung-fu. People go see his movies not for his acting but for his action. In this movie, however, you would see him acts most of the time and only fights occasionally. He is perfect for portraying a man who caught in between the ambition he believes will do the better good for the people and the guilt of betraying others, for the sake of the better good. Andy Lau is equally good here and he shows us some very moving sequences, something we have not seen since, probably Infernal Affairs. His character is a man lives in one simple idea, an idea of always protecting his own men. Casting Takeshi Kaneshiro as the third brother is probably due to the fact Kaneshiro was the male lead in director Peter Chan’s last film Perhaps Love. He might look too handsome for the role of a simple minded and often confused man, especially when he is not with beard, but he proves he is not the weak point of the film. Xu Jinglei, who played Zhao’s wife, is little known outside of China. Her role might be underdeveloped, intentional or not. She played the wife of a powerful man and maintains a secret relationship with another even more powerful man. She is not really happy about being with anyone of them, but feeling so powerless, she simply accepts whatever happens.

The entire movie is presented in a very dark and suffocating tone. The costumes, by Yee Chung-Man (Curse of the Golden Flower) are all sewed with dark and poorly made fibers and always look ragged and dirty. The actions, by Ching Siu-Tung (Curse of the Golden Flower, House of the Flying Daggers, Hero), are brutal and bloody. The battle scenes were acted with real men rather than some CG pixels. People are not flying in mid-air or showing fancy moves, like in many other martial-art flicks. Although it is visible that many extras were just pretending to fight, choreographing these senses with thousands of real persons and real hardware, horses, swords, bows, muskets and cannons, are becoming rare these days and should be applauded. Cinematographer Arthur Wong (Ultraviolet, New Dragon Inn, Once Upon a Time in China), shot the film in dark lightings with shaky style, which enhanced the tone further.

In a war never seems to end, dying is easier and living is hard, and in a corrupted system, which gains from people’s misery, brotherhood, love, friendship, trust, honor and dignity, nothing really matters; and survival is the only thing matters if you really want to survive.