The Guillotines

A Chinese Jesus and his disciples versus a hypocritical emperor and his rapid response unit with flying guillotines, which is to say that everything is wrong with this. The makers of this hopeless would-be epic perhaps wanted to create a lavish clone of Jason Bourne and Zhang Yimou’s Hero, but not even the film’s extravagant budget can cover up the imbecility and misguidedness of the project. What most hinders The Guillotines is how the film’s comic-bookishly exaggerated premise develops into an absurdly overwrought and overly serious narrative that says nothing and only attacks viewers with feverish pathos and faltering fatefulness. Though all of the conflicts and twists are transparent from the beginning of the film, the narrative tries to disguise them with an incredibly complicated exposition. On top of that, the film lacks any spatial or logical causality, instead giving priority to superficial spectacle. The climax is a matter of phantasmagorically unhinged internal anti-logic, which comes across as almost caustic (at least from a European perspective that gives preference to individuality). Let’s just say that thousands of people die in the film only so that a handful of tough guys can realise that they are on the wrong side, after which thousands more people, including those tough guys, die so that someone else can realise their error. And while all of this is going on, the killing of one character by another is postponed only so the target in question voluntarily gets killed simply as a gesture of pathos after the mounds of corpses have been levelled. And that’s not to mention the absolutely needless 3D, which doesn’t come through in the film at all and is thus just an artificial means of attracting viewers to the cinema and forcing them to pay more. In the film’s extremely short and usually close-up shots with the camera movement, there is no space left to accentuate the 3D effect. (12/02/2013)