Peter Chan’s The Warlords: Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro star in gritty anti-war film

Chan, known for light dramas, jumped on the bandwagon of martial arts blockbusters to make a movie best remembered for its large-scale battle sequences

But he didn’t want to replicate Chang Cheh’s The Blood Brothers, on which it was based, and intervened to ensure the fight scenes did not look too ‘Chang Cheh’

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Andy Lau in a scene from The Warlords (2007). The film was originally to be a remake of Chang Cheh’s famous The Blood Brothers, but director Peter Chan had other ideas.

Published: 5:15am, 2 May 2021Updated: 5:59pm, 3 May 2021

Peter Chan Ho-sun had not made an action film before he made The Warlords, the 2007 war drama which features Jet Li Lianjie as an ambitious general leading the Qing army to victory over the Taiping rebels.

Chan was best known for heart-warming light dramas like 1996’s Comrades, Almost a Love Story , but the emergence of the Chinese blockbuster phenomenon, which saw big-budget Hong Kong action films achieving good results at the box office in China, prompted a change of style for the director and producer.

The result was a gritty anti-war film which effectively split its time between the internecine wrangling of its three main protagonists – played by Li, Andy Lau Tak-wah and Takeshi Kaneshiro – and the spectacle of large-scale battle sequences.

Chan’s The Warlords was originally intended as a remake of Chang Cheh’s famous 1973 movie The Blood Brothers , a complex martial arts drama which focused on how romance and lust can strain and break the bonds of brotherhood, but ultimately turned out to be much different.

The story, which had been filmed at least twice before, and had also been adapted for Shanghai-style Peking Operas, is based on a real event which has been called one of the “Four Mysteries of the Qing dynasty”. Known as Zhang Wenxiang Assassinates Ma, it is the story of the assassination of ambitious Qing general Ma Xinyi by one of his associates for a still-unknown reason.