At the age of 80, you might suspect that a director with the proven track record and highly influential resume of someone like Yuen Woo-ping might want to take it easy for his first proper directorial outing in nearly a decade. How wrong you would be. This wild wuxia film moves at a mile-a-minute – good luck keeping track of the storyline – with the sort of furtive, gob-smacking action sequences that would exhaust a director a third his age. He doesn’t scrimp on spectacle, throwing everything and the kitchen sink at desert-bound set-pieces involving swathes of extras on horseback, hulking big weapons, swords on fire and, in one amazing sequence, an exhilarating gravity-defying bust-up inside a sandstorm. The fact the movie is set up as a potential franchise shows a brazen disregard for the natural laws of aging which is completely admirable – this is a filmmaker with more to say, and on the evidence of this, his voice is louder than ever. Of course it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that it would take a director with the calibre, clout and connections of Yuen Woo-ping to breathe new life into a genre which has floundered since its cross-cultural heyday in the early 2000s (re Crouching Tiger, Hero), before finding its inevitable home amongst the somewhat insipid romances and CGI fantasies found on Chinese streaming platforms. This film is as much a kick-up-the-backside for the wuxia film as it is a tribute to the man behind it all – someone whose lineage ranges from the original Wong Fei-hung series to Keanu Reeves – and in this tribute to his genius, many of his “discoveries” make solemn appearances to pay it forward. Like his good friend and colleague, Jet Li, who comes out of retirement for a welcome duel in the opening act. Then there’s Wu Jing, who made his debut in Woo-ping’s 1996 film Tai Chi Boxer, leading with great aplomb as a former Imperial soldier turned bounty hunter, caught between his need to protect a vulnerable child and to fight injustice; and make way for Max Zhang, former Woo-ping stunt team member, who joins Jet in his extended cameo. Kara Hui and Tony Leung Ka-fai also find room in the star-studded crowd, but this isn’t just a legacy act; younger support arrives with great turns from the likes of Yu Shi as a comically stoic silver-haired mercenary, and the hunky Nicholas Tse, who is always engaging in another antihero role. The main delight is Chen Lijun, who plays the heroic, passionate leader of a sword-fighting clan whose members are slain, leading to her own powerful revenge subplot which really drives the drama. In true wuxia fashion, the film is a convoluted, multi-character affair with many competing elements (it’s based on a Chinese manhua and constantly feels like it’s straining under the weight of its own plot), with the most coherent through-line centring around Wu Jing’s late Sui Dynasty bounty hunter, Da Mao, who is escorting a sought-after bunch of rebels through treacherous desert, one-horse towns, and the colourful Silk Road to get to the city of Chang’an. On their travels, they confront bandits and rival clans in a broiling political landscape. The ragtag group resembles something out of Journey to the West, that ever-present Chinese fable, while the film’s escalating violence couldn’t be further from the term ‘family friendly’. After all, this is a movie in which Wu Jing kicks a guy’s head clean off. The film’s multigenerational appeal – and widespread success internationally – looks likely to bring Chinese wuxia cinema back into the foreground, and how beautifully apt for Hong Kong’s surviving kung fu filmmaker to be leading the charge.

Blades of the Guardians is cinemas in UK and Ireland from 16 April 2026 courtesy of Trinity CineAsia.