Dynasty Warriors (2021)

At Its Core, It's a Video Game Movie

I'm prefacing this by saying that I'm as massive fan of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, so when this movie got announced I was both terrified and excited simultaneously to see it happen. I wasn't disappointed, but neither was I wholly impressed, but I did find myself actually enjoying the movie.

The biggest thing you need to understand going into this is that this movie is, at the end of the day, a video game movie. If you're going in looking for a Three Kingdoms (2010)-Dynasty Warriors combo, this isn't it. The story is pretty straight-forward, the action is kinda insane, and so long as you take it for what it is - an adaptation of a franchise known for being a little whack - then you will enjoy this movie if for no other reason than it's nuts.

The characters are about what you'd expect from a Dynasty Warriors setting: Liu Bei and his brothers fight for righteousness and to restore the Han Dynasty, Cao Cao is coming in with ulterior motives and seeking to get rid of the crumbling Han Dynasty, and you have Dong Zhuo being the evil supervillain he is with Lu Bu on a leash. None of them are particularly deep, but considering that the video game franchise only just now made them more than archetypes (i.e. Cao Cao isn't a mustache twirling villain anymore and Liu Bei's personality is now more than "BENEVOLENCE!"), it was about what I expected going in. Wang Kai was amazing as Cao Cao and gave him an interesting bit of depth I wasn't expecting, and he was probably one of the best things about the movie. Tony Yang as Liu Bei was pretty bland overall, but that seemed more from the script and less from him. Louis Koo is about the only person I figured could have pulled off Lu Bu and he did great. I wasn't too hip on most of the cast when I saw the initial casting, but in terms of capturing what the characters were about in the source material, they did a decent job. Not good, not bad, just decent.

The story was... lackluster. Honestly, this is one of those movies where you really shouldn't be going into this for the story. There was one, and if you know anything about Romance of the Three Kingdoms, then this is hardly a spoiler: Dong Zhuo usurps the throne and our intrepid heroes form a coalition to stop him no matter the cost, but it was clearly an afterthought when placed beside the absolutely insane fight scenes that I expected out of this movie. It was pretty obvious that the movie was made around the battles between Lu Bu and... everyone. They attempted to explain how these people got their weird, whack powers and it felt dumb. If they had just owned it and had everyone's weapons shooting fire and lightning, it would have worked better than trying to explain it, honestly. It felt really cliched to have these weapons be "magical" and "given to people with great destinies" when literally everyone and their mother is slinging elemental powers around in the source material. Letting the viewer just use the suspension of disbelief would have been much more effective. The movie also ended in a weird place, which left me sitting back and going "Wait, we're ending here?" Nothing really gets resolved and that's really disappointing considering how they were building up the big battle with Cao Cao, Yuan Shao, Liu Bei and his bros against Dong Zhuo and Lu Bu. They get to Luoyang, there's a time skip, and suddenly the credits are rolling. It's a weird stopping point, especially if we never see a sequel.

The effects were okay, not horrible and the stylized way they were done weirdly fit the movie, and the fight scenes were exactly what you'd expect in a movie that was blending the crazy elements of a video game with wuxia martial arts. The crazy part is that it works. The stuff in between the fights did leave me hoping that someone would start a fight again just to get it moving because they were hands-down the best part of the movie. They were insane. They were crazy. They were chaotic.

And I loved them.

When the movie embraces the "one dude killing thousands of people on his own" motif, it is so much fun that it's insane. When it grabs ahold of what made Dynasty Warriors cool, the movie is incredible. It's so much fun and I found myself going "This is insane, and I love it!" more than once during the fight scenes. When it tries to be a melodrama with a wuxia backdrop, it fails. Horribly.

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