Adrien Brody

(In French, on TV, June 2020) In early retrospect, the 2010s were a weird decade of cinematographic American/Chinese intermingling. Much of it can be explained by China’s conscious efforts to make inroads in Hollywood through financing deals and co-productions. By the end of the decade, Chinese films were better than ever (having learned much from Hollywood), while American audiences were left with endless logos at the beginning of many films, bizarre casting choices and Hollywood’s refusal to take any sort of principled position against China. Still, artifacts of this period will remain with us, and you can take Dragon Blade as one of the most obvious ones. Clearly an attempt to combine the strengths of eastern and western filmmaking, it proposes Roman soldiers making their way to the end of the Silk Road and allying themselves with Chinese forces against another group of Roman soldiers. Somehow, Adrien Brody is presented an action hero, facing down a team-up of John Cusack and Jackie Chan as an elderly pacifist warrior. It’s all executed in grandiose fashion by writer-director Daniel Lee, with big spectacular fight sequences, fancy CGI and sweeping camera shots. (You can tell that this isn’t The Great Wall because there are no supernatural enemies.) Alas, the result is mixed. Brody chews scenery while Cusack looks perplexed, and Chan’s martial sequences are low-key compared to his earlier films—not to mention atonal in the middle of a big CGI battle film. Dragon Blade isn’t particularly good, although it does warrant some attention for its blend of things that don’t necessarily go together, even if they’re proven not to go together. I’m not sure if this decade of China/Hollywood collaboration will last [October 2024: Four years into the 2020s, it looks as if China is leaving Hollywood alone, having extracted all it could], but we’ll always have Dragon Blade as a memento of that time.