Shadowless Sword is Korean movie featuring some nice sword work and a cool story about a girl who must protect the only remaining prince of a royal family from assassination.
It takes place in 926AD when all but the last Prince of the Balhae Kingdom have been assassinated to give power to a new king.
The Chucksaldan (Korean name for Killer Blade Army) have been sent out to track down this Prince and kill him – but he’s kept his life very secret and is hard to find!
When those loyal to the Balhae family realize what’s coming, they send out a female swords woman named Yeon So-ha, the best they have, to find and protect Prince Dae Jeong-hyun form harm.
So-ha tracks down the Prince but has trouble convincing him of her honest intentions, meanwhile the Chucksaldan find him shortly after and the situation becomes very dangerous and both So-ha and Jeong-hyun do their best to evade being captured or killed before returning to the capital.
Not too bad!
This movie offers a pretty nice ‘on the run’ style pace as we see our heroes escaping and fighting off a much larger and more powerful enemy in the Chucksaldan.
I always love this kind of movie but not because it’s well though out, but because it leads to plenty of fight scenes where we see our main hero So-ha cutting up bad guys like crazy with her skills.
She does have a bit of a funny message throughout the film, repeating that the sword ‘protects that most valuable to us’, right after chopping up countless soldiers and claiming that it’s not really for killing. Yeah I know – self defense, right?
They do offer something a little bigger in this movie other than ‘the chase’ though, as we start to see So-ha develop feelings for the young prince whilst he denies he is a good person (usually after doing some heroic deed like saving a life). But it all unfolds and we learn that’s there’s a deeper history behind her fascination, it’s done pretty nicely.
The Action & Martial Arts
The action! That’s what we came here for!
This movie offers some nice “spinny slicey” sword fights combined with a tiny bit of gravity defying wirework just to add a tiny bit of fantasy to the action.
The speed and execution of the choreography is nice, keeping the energy levels high, but unfortunately it just didn’t quite reach that high level it had the potential for. A lot of the fight is, as I mentioned above, “spinny slicey” – lots of the same thing.
It’s not really bad though, it’s just not fantastic. The movie still offers a nice chunk of action that any martial arts fan would be happy to see, but the level is kept pretty constant throughout the film’s many fights.
The Verdict?
It’s not bad, but pretty standard. Worth a watch if you like pretty girls and sword work!
On DVD –
Region 1 (US & Canada)
The Legend of the Shadowless Sword
Region 2 (UK, Europe, etc)
The Legend Of The Shadowless Sword [2006] [DVD]
Region 4 (Australia, New Zealand, etc)
Shadowless Sword
