Movie review - Eye for an Eye: Blind Swordsman

Eye for an Eye: Blind Swordsman (Mu Zhong wu ren) ** (out of 5) Chinese martial arts films have a long tradition of including quite an array of masterful fighters with significant disabilities. Many of them feature a hero who is blind, deaf, missing an arm, etc. yet still able to defeat whatever evil being or force must be eliminated for the common good. That usually yields a bunch of intricately choreographed battles – one-on-ones with the worst, often preceded by dispatching hordes of underlings and anonymous minions.

Blind Swordsman follows the pattern in a relatively low-key production set in the distant (pre-firearms) past. Cheng (Miao Xie) has the unlikely job of itinerant bounty hunter for the government. He’s very good at it, of course, despite his lack of sight. The film opens in a gambling den. We soon learn he’s been hunting the region’s bad guys down for a decade. Remaining skills are evident when he doesn’t need vision to tell that they’re cheating, leading to action that establishes his credentials for both integrity and mad skills. Cheng is quiet, humble and all business.

Unfortunately, he stops for a drink at what will become the sight of a massacre by an evil warlord, including the rape of a lovely woman (Wieman Gao) who was about to be married. When the local authorities, obviously feeling the perps are too powerful for them to handle, decline, Cheng takes up her cause of seeking justice. That comprises the rest of the running time which includes a couple of important non-combat roles for women in the plot. As the genre goes, this one plays out more sedately than many, even venturing into the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon realm of lyricism in a few picturesque scenes. The final battle will remind fans of the sequence in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 between The Bride (Uma Thurman) and O Ren Rishii (Lucy Liu).

Those seeking a swordfest of splatter will find this to be on the tame side. Writer/director Bingjia Yang pulls a lot of punches, cutting away early in scenes of mass swordfights, returning only to show the number of prone henchmen killed or wounded while our eyes were diverted to something else. The fights he displays are diverse and well-choregraphed, relatively free of wire work and other special effects that turn fiction into fantasy. One exception is a cloaked baddie with almost supernatural agility and speed. Cool scenes with him in motion.

There’s nothing particularly memorable about the production for those who devour Asian action fare from the 1970s to the present. But it’s non-gory enough to embrace those preferring character and story arcs to bloodlust, while having a fair amount of mayhem for the adrenalin junkies.

(Eye for an Eye: Blind Swordsman (Mu Zhong wu ren), in Mandarin with subtitles, is available in digital formats, on Blu-ray and DVD as of 11/28/23)