From the Rental Vault (2005): The Legend of the Shadowless Sword

Most of us today know about the division of the Korean peninsula into two separate countries -- the Western-allied democratic South and the oppressive totalitarian North. But over its history, the nation that became Korea grew from a number of other states, some of which spread out into the region we know as Manchuria. One such kingdom was the nation of Balhae, which was conquered in 926 by the Khitan people and divided between the Liao Dynasty empire of eastern and northern China and the Goryeo nation in the south -- the people who would one day give the nation of Korea its name. The Legend of the Shadowless Sword (in Korean, Mu-yeong-gum) is a 2005 movie that tells the fictionalized story of Balhae's last king and his resistance to the Khitan conquest.

Gun Hwa-pyung, the commander of the Killer Blade Army, is tracking down all of the members of the Balhae royal family to either capture or exterminate them. His own desire for vengeance has pretty much left out the "either capture or" part of that mission, though, and now the hidden prince Dae Jeong-hyun is the only survivor. The great warrior woman Yeon So-ha is dispatched to find him and bring him to where the Balhae army is encamped, to be their leader.

She finds him, but he's living by selling stolen goods and has little desire to risk his life as a prince or king. Survival is his primary goal. Yeon So-ha convinces him to accompany her -- mostly because the Killer Blade Army has tracked him down and Mae Yung-ok, its lieutenant, has only been prevented from killing him by Yeon's skill with her "shadowless sword."

As they flee from their pursuers, So-ha's loyalty and devotion begin to crack Dae's cynicism and remind him of his own heroic past. She in turn learns that a king feels responsible for his subjects and the best rulers are the ones who as willing to risk themselves for their people as their people might be to risk themselves for their ruler. Drawing on the strength of the idea that their shared military experience and near-mystical weaponry is to be used for protection, they eventually face off against Gun and Mae, who see those same things only as ways to kill and destroy.

Korean action star Shin Hyun-jun takes on what is for him the unfamiliar role as a villain as the vengeance-obsessed murderous Gun. He plays the commander as stoic and quiet, lending his outbursts of violence an even greater impact by contrast. As Prince Dae, Lee Seo Jin makes a believable journey from cynical fence looking out for his own hide to a noble leader who accepts his duties. Yoon So Yi, only 20 when Sword was being made, carries some of the heaviest load of both action and drama and does so quite well. She expresses So-ha's deadliness, naïveté and no-nonsense attitude towards her duties with equal skill. 

Sword is a wire-fighting movie, meaning the characters leap impossible distances and hang in the air long enough to perform impossible feats. The technique can look silly sometimes, but director Kim Young-jun and the effects department for Sword use it sparingly and make the super-human feats more like the qualities of characters in a folk tale than some kind of mystic art.

It's only available in a subtitled version rather than a dubbed one, which can make following it more work than one might be used to. But it's a great story, well-acted and worth that extra effort for those who like their action movies to give the neurons a workout as well.