I'm a great fan of Tsui Hark. His movies are stylish ripping yarns. A mystical Chinese Seven Samurai.

Seven Swords has Tsui Hark conjure up 1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7 swords.Lengthy can be used to describe the story. There's a lot of characters to go around and while sporting a decent pace early, there are moments later on when it slows down. By the time the end credits roll, 2 and a half hours have passed. With that said, there is enough material to fill the time; just not enough of the right material.The action is highly stylized with unique weapons across the board; however, the lack of emphasis on the swords is a letdown and the editing during the martial arts segments has room for improvement.The cast needs no introduction. Some characters have great buildup, while others are, unfortunately, left in the dust. Donnie Yen and Leon Lai are a bit stale. On the other hand, Honglei Sun and Jingchu Zhang have emotion.Seven Swords has the potential to be much more, but it is good for what it is.

Its all right for what it was. Could have used some more editing to take off about 30 mins more

another winner from tsui

3 stars = Director Tsui Hark(1 Star) + Action Director Lau Kar Leung(1 Star) + Composer Kenji Kawai(1 Star)That's the best rating I could give.I believe that this can be turned out a better result,if shorten the length of film and less fan-service.I don't mind the weak acting from the cast except Lau Kar Leung and Honglei Sun(The main villain).There is enjoyable actions sequence and nice final boss battle which smoothly imagined by the action director,just some of the views are a bit shaky.The first words of the tittle "Seven",will indeed reminded you of the Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece "Seven Samurai",same story and same numbers of heroes but of coarse with a different style.Not bad,it's a fun ride,anyway.

seven swords is a brilliant film the bad thing is its subtitled which is not kl

have brought this film twice now 1 on DVD and 1 on itunes

This was an epic movie with flourishes of originality. Absolute mesmerising weaponary and fighting, like a chinese lord of the rings kind of! :P

Excellent, nuff said.

ok if you don't like blood, gore and watching body parts being hacked off..you won't handle this film...you will also need to either read English subtitles or have your DvD set to translate to English...this is a Japanese film. It is a wonderful film of Seven Warriors who want to stop armies from killing the villagers who choose to practice the martial arts. You have to really be into this kind of film.

True epic from one of Asia's top directors. Extraordinary filmmaking. Pretty cool stuff. And yet, this may be the one asian movie that I think a shorter cut would improve it. Seven Samurai this movie is not. What a bummer. It came so close.Now if you want to go deeper and find out why this movie disappointed many people, it's that it is like a spiritual and generational successor to the early 90s swordplay/martial arts films, most of them cheap Wong Jing crap. However, as classy as this movie is, it still doesn't live up to the ability of one of China's greatest directors of all time. It's a little boring, especially on repeat veiwing. 2 and a half hours is awfully long. That's epic Lord of the Rings length, which this does want to be. Or a Chinese answer to Korea's "Musa" but with more fantasy. Rare is the movie that needs that length and can maintain it. It turns out that the Seven Swords sequel that was never made could've helped - the 2 movies could've made 3 streamlined flicks of let's say 1 hour 40 minutes each and still have had better fleshed out characters which is the biggest problem here! The seven swordsmen and the people they protect and the people they're fighting -- you don't even know everybody's name. This makes it not easy sometimes to get through it all in one sitting, or multiple viewing. Luckily there are great action sequences including the end which is quite unforgettable.So all-in-all, this is a rare, high-quality, high-class fantasy, and yet one that drops the ball on an emotional level due to its scope and confidence much like the villains of the piece. A movie version of a book with this many characters can't afford to take its time on an artistic level to look at amazing pictures of mountains and mountain goats and meteors as breathtaking as it may look when Tsui Hark is in charge. It needs every moment with each character to win you over immediately as in Infernal Affairs or Hero. It's kind of tragic how good this movie is, and yet isn't all at the same time.Seven Swords won't be in your favorites list, but it's a good watch. It looks super good and it's a .... story. With action.

Overlong action-packed film with quite a convoluted plot which makes it quite difficult to follow. Apart from that, the action scenes are a joy to watch even though the viewer is never quite sure what is going on until a mortal wound is revealed.

i think i've only seen half of this... kind of drags

This is the most violent live action asian movie I have seen. I have seen enough of them to have some understanding of their directing styles. All other asian action movies have people dying and blood can be seen but the limbs going in all directions little to none in them. Having body parts thrown all over the place seems very American and 7 swords is Americanized in this sense I can be wrong since I?m not an American citizen.The story of 7 swords is there is an imperial decree that bans martial arts practice and a price is set for the heads of those who practice. There?s a bandit group who leads a section of the imperial army on the implementation of decree. A man goes to a village warns all about it but arrested as a traitor/criminal from previous government. He escapes with 2 in tow and gathers a group of fighters to stop the bandit group and save the village.The sword fighting in this movie is several times better than the sword fighting in the 2nd matrix movie. Think matrix 1 fighting with swords. If you go past the inaccurate history and some forward references to older or other films, this can be a good movie. I give this 3/5 stars, would give it a 3.5/5 almost all due to the cool sword fighting in it. The sword and other weapon designs are cool.

i think that maybe it suffered because originally it was meant to be a two part story. the story jumps quite a lot. the first part of the movie also drags...its not a terrible film but i have seen better