From the Rental Vault: 14 Blades (2010)

All too often, conspirators who lack their own senses of honor rely on others who retain theirs, knowing that they can plot and plan taking advantage of a range of options not available to their opponents -- or, in some cases, their pawns.

That's the situation faced by Ming Dynasty secret warrior Qinglong (Donnie Yen) in the 2010 tale of palace intrigue, 14 Blades. Qinglong is the commander of the emperor's super-secret corps of bodyguard/assassins called the Jinyiwei. Selected as orphans and trained since childhood for brutal combat, the Jinyiwei also guard the artifact known as the "14 Blades," a box of special bladed weapons they can call on in combat. The Jinyiwei, or "Embroidered Uniform Guard," actually existed and were used as both guards and fighters. Their real power came not from an arcane artifact, though, but from their imperial authority to overrule any legal proceedings in favor of their own arrests, investigations, trials and punishments.

During Qinglong's tenure as commander, the Emperor himself is weak and incompetent. A royal eunuch, Jia Jingzhong, plots with his exiled uncle Prince Qing (Sammo Hung, in what amounts to a cameo role) to overthrow the throne. A key feature of the plot is the theft of the Imperial Seal, supposed to be carried out by Qinglong, but Qinglong uncovers the treachery at the heart of his mission and swears to stop the conspirators and avenge the deaths of his comrades. Against him are the renegade Jianyiwei commander Xuanwei (Qi Yuwu) and Prince Qing's adoptive daughter Tuo Tuo (Kate Tsui), a deadly assassin herself. But he gains unlikely allies in a bandit known as the Judge of the Desert (Wu Chun) and the daughter of a band of bodyguards for hire, Qiao Hua (Zhao Wei).

By this time in his career Donnie Yen was a master at playing the stoic "Man With No Name"-style lead. He's not necessarily a hero -- he commands the secret police, after all -- but when confronted with plots that go against his honor he remembers a little of what kind of man he once wanted to be. Setting himself squarely against the treachery surrounding him, he resolves to be that man now, even if it will only be service in a losing cause. The rest of the cast hit their own marks with more or less success. Qi Yuwu conveys a little of his own ruefulness at fighting his former comrade and killing many others. Wu Chun's Judge of the Desert brings the chaos to his "chaotic good"-styled character, unwilling to set aside his own prickly sense of honor because of Qinglong's rank and position. Zhao Wei properly mixes steely and spunky as the only daughter of the bodyguard agency, but Qiao Hua is not much different from several other characters she's played and her arc rises above average only in the movie's epilogue. Kate Tsui plays Tuo Tuo as a deadly cipher, present mainly to hack and occasionally slash.

Wuxia movies like 14 Blades rise and fall on their action sequences, and here director Daniel Lee proves unable to fully carry its load across the finish line. Some fight scenes early on hang together and flow well, but the longer the movie moves the more disconnected and perfunctory they become. The wire-fighting and CGI don't mix smoothly and the protagonists switch around enough that just who's fighting who gets a little fuzzy. In the end 14 Blades feels like one of the lesser Clint Eastwood Man With No Namers -- centered on a well-matched actor and character type he's used to playing, but surrounded by a story and supporting cast more flung than stitched together.