This may very well be the dumbest film John Cusack has ever been in, and that’s saying something for a guy who once starred in a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine. Dragon Blade claims to have been “inspired by true events” in Chinese history, but the final product feels more like the result of Chinese whispers.
The plot recounts the coming together of the fictional Silk Road Protection Squad and an equally fictitious Roman Legion in Northwest China in the year 50 BC. For some unfathomable reason, the Chinese characters speak Mandarin, while the Roman characters speak English (as they are indeed wont to do in the movies; they usually speak the King’s English, but that’s something that Cusack, as good as he usually is, couldn’t possibly ever pull off).
Consider this: Roman general Lucius (Cusack) addresses captain Huo An (Jackie Chan) in English, and Huo replies also in (broken) English — but since we have to assume that English is here a stand-in for Latin, we have no choice but to conclude that Huo somehow dabbles in Latin. I guess it’s not entirely impossible, but it is unlikely enough (relations between the Roman Repubic/Empire and the Han Empire were tenuous at best) that an explanation seems to be in order — no such luck, though; I guess we’ll have to chalk it up to some sort of transitive property.
Following this alleged first contact (the first undisputed Sino-Roman contact occurred in 61 AD when an embassy from either Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius or his successor Marcus Aurelius reached the Chinese Emperor Huan of Han at Luoyang), the movie turns for a while into a knock-off of The Bridge on the River Kwai, only with a lot less enmity. Accused of a crime they didn’t commit, the Squad are sent to “the Wild Geese Gate … to rebuild the city.” With the help of the Roman’s superior engineering skills, the unnamed city is rebuilt in a fortnight (they’re all very proud of the fruit of their labor, although Patsy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail would surely deride it as, ‘only a computer-generated image’). There is a celebration, and when it’s the Roman’s turn to serenade their hosts, they sing in Latin — not English-Latin, mind you, but Latin-Latin. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that they were actually building the Tower of Babel (which would be about as factual as any other event depicted in this fucking movie).
For reasons not worth recounting, Lucius & Co. had been fleeing Tiberius (Adrien Brody thoroughly miscast as the villain. Brody can be every bit as good as Cusack; however, just like Cusack, he isn’t good enough to be convincingly bad. Dark, and even brutal, he can be, and certainly was in Clean — but a bad-to-the-bone guy? Never), another Roman general who is marching toward the city with 100,000 soldiers (the Romans are conveniently color-coded; the good ones wear red and the evils ones blue. You know, just like Crips and Bloods).
Huo has an idea: “I can borrow a soldier from my friend Yin Po.” Unless it’s a Universal Soldier I don’t see how that would help; then again, with all of this linguistic confusion maybe Huo just can’t get his singulars and plurals straight. Either way it doesn’t matter because Yin Po (Choi Siwon) is in cahoots with Tiberius, leading a member of the Squad to lament, “We fell for Yin Po’s trap.” Yeah, but it was Huo’s idea to ask Yin Po for help; how is that a trap? All things considered, Dragon Blade, unlike most Jackie Chan flicks, doesn’t even provide the consolation of a blooper reel during the closing credits. On the other hand, the entire movie could be considered one big fucking blooper.
90% of Everything is Crap 