Dragon Blade (2015)

Daniel Lee's Dragon Blade arrives bearing the full weight of a Jackie Chan peace mission, which is a curious cargo for a picture that spends so much of its runtime arranging enormous armies into battle lines. Chan plays Huo An, commander of a Han dynasty customs and peacekeeping outfit on the Silk Road, a man whose chief qualification for the post appears to be an unshakeable willingness to feed starving Romans. The film gathers Chinese, Roman, Xiongnu, Turkic and Parthian players into one fortress and asks them to rebuild a wall together. It is a genuinely international production, and the diversity reads as geography. The Silk Road was crowded. Nobody in the production office needed a consultant to notice that.

The women fare less well. A Xiongnu warrior gets a duel and then a seat in the background, while Huo An's wife teaches orphans of several ethnicities before dying in his arms so that he might protect them. Her function is maternal and sacrificial, and the film has no further use for her. There is no romantic or political life beyond the heterosexual arrangement, no queer presence of any kind, and no interest in bodies that deviate from the heroic mold. The ethnic harmony on display is sincere and entirely pre-modern in its logic: a peace message about people sharing a desert, not a statement about structural injustice. No environmental lament intrudes. No merchant class gets its reckoning.

The history is where the film indulges itself. It dramatizes Homer Dubs' 1941 speculation about Roman prisoners drifting east into Han territory, a theory most historians reject, and builds an entire alliance on top of it. That is fantasy, not ideology with a filing system. The sermonizing is gentler and more general. Chan has said he made the film to spread peace, and it shows. Characters explain the theme aloud, sometimes twice, and Indian critics read the whole enterprise as a national advertisement, which is harsh but not baseless. The result is a lumbering, well-choreographed homily with swords.