Goddard once said that the best way to criticize a film was to make another film about it. This was what Tsui did with “The Blade.” “The Blade” itself was a remake of the One-armed Swordsman franchise that populated the cinema in the late 60s. This type of stories is always the same—a hero must avenged the death of his loved ones, but his kung fu was not good enough, as a result he lost the match and arm, he decided to develop a new martial arts for himself and did. The Blade took only the backbone of the story; it went on to make statements about filmmaking in general.
The first filmmaker it criticizes is of course, Wong Kar-Wai. Tsui’s created a character that sounds like someone out of a Wong Kar-Wai film, Ling (Song Nei) and puts her in Tsui’s own gritty universe of fighters. Ling appears to be self-centered and naïve, if not pseudo-intellectual.

Then he goes on to lament the death of “old school” kung fu movies. A kung fu monk is murdered in the first fight scene when he tries to rescue the girls from the bandits, he is dressed less like a real monk than one from other kung fu movies. His style of fighting resembles that of a Shaolin monk, but he is killed, and for the rest of the movie, the choreography is brutal and dirty. The camera bounces like a pinball, it shakes, but with precision and purpose; every movement and every cut is used to maybe close-up on a move or an object in the scenes or maybe to represent a character’s point of view. The movie’s villain, Fei Long (“Flying Dragon”) is feared by all because of his ability to fly, which seems to be a dig on the abuses on wires in the Hong Kong action film industry.

There is a lot of nostalgia in this movie; everyone misses the world as the way it used to be. The title character, “An” (Zhao Wen-Zhou), begins his quest (that costs him his arm) by wanting to find out about his past, his father. There is no new hope in the end, but rather, it shows the characters living the lives they used to live. Or dreaming about it anyways.

This was Zhao WenZhuo's best movie, the fight scenes were exhilirating, if you could take the blood I guess. No real problems with it except for the messed up timeline (how long, exactly, did all this take place?) It was real cool otherwise, both artistically and martial artistically.