Movie reviewers invited to screenings usually see it as their job to sit through a movie, no matter how bad it is. However, during the media screening of this film, many reviewers walked out after 10 minutes. More walked out before half-an-hour into the screening.

It could be because they do not understand the film as there were no subtitles at the screening, but I get the feeling that those who walked out just couldn't stand watching such trash. Stoically, I stayed on.

The plot is purportedly about a mystical blade which looks like an old chopping knife. As it passes through the hands of the titular characters, each with different motivations, it shapes their destinies. The Butcher (Liu Xiaoye) is a fat slob in love with a beautiful courtesan (Kitty Zhang),but is rebuffed each time he approaches her. The Chef (Masanobu Ando) is a loner bent on seeking revenge for the slaughter of his family. The Swordsman (Ashton Xu),the son of a legendary warrior, is consumed by the desire to eclipse his father in both power and fame.

Their stories intertwine as each man takes possession of the mystical blade and discovers the power and the danger it brings.

I am sure there will be some smart alecs who will see this as a work of a genius but it was sheer torture sitting through this unholy trash, trying to figure out what is happening and why. The scenes are so devoid of logic and interest that the movie would make the puerile eye-candy flick, Sucker Punch, look like a classic art flick of epic proportions. The actors seem to have been selected for their weird circus side-show looks than for how well they can act. There are curious looking midgets in the cast and even one made up to look like Jabba The Hutt.

Director Wuershan, who used to shoot adverts, fails miserably at trying his hand on a feature film. He throws in all sorts of crazy, pop culture stuff and even repeating an aria from Puccini's Tosca, in a bid to lend style (or a sense of art) to the scenes. But it turns out to be more of an unintentional comedy - or a tragicomedy. The few sequences that look interesting enough are those dealing with food. Makes me wonder what sort of hallucinatory drug Wuershan was on when he made this film. (limchangmoh.blogspot.com)

Form over content film about what happens when the title characters all gain possession of a magical blade that was forged from several other legendary blades and their destinies are all intertwined.

Your tolerance for this film will depend upon how you take form over content---and whether you can take a film that looks like an 30 second commercial expanded to 90 minutes. Its all clever images and rapid cutting.

I lost patience very fast and had I not been watching this on DVD where fast forward is a possibility I would have walked out. Don't get me wrong it looks great, but outside of the look there didn't seem to be very much here.

Your mileage will vary.

The first few minutes of THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN gave me pause: the hip-hop-rock scoring, the one- and two-second cutting rhythms, the alternating between color, black & white, and artificially colored black and white, the use of kooky on-screen graphics. Everything just screamed that this would be a 90 minute assault on the senses from a director who probably had a lot of experience with music videos. And that's basically what it is, but where Hong Kong director Andrew Lau tried this fast-cutting bullshiht with THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHEN, more or less ruining a story and trivializing characters that didn't deserve it, Wuershan's THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN is a gonzo story stocked to capacity with a grimy grotesquerie of characters that all but demand an addled directorial style to give them life.

Expanded from a fiction piece from a magazine (according to the director),the movie is a story within a story within another story in which three cursed owners of a near-mythical blade (forged from a ball of iron originally melted down from the weapons of many powerful swordsman) relate in flashback the stories of the how they came to possess the knife. Reaching the third tale, the film then boomerangs back through the climaxes of each story to bring us back to the present. Sounds a bit like INCEPTION, right? Only with flashbacks instead of dreams. The two films were shot independently of one another, making the similarity in structure a pure coincidence.

Everything but the kitchen sink is in here: a brothel madam and her charges berate "The Butcher" with a catchy modern-style hip-hop rap number (so yes, this is partly a musical!); crudely but cleverly animated children's sketches illustrate "The Chef's" flashing back to his father being killed by a corpulent eunuch for not satisfying his finicky culinary demands. Duped by his beloved, "The Butcher" skirmishes with her true beau in a Streetfighter-like video game scenario, complete with life-meters and flashing scores. This is truly unlike any other film made in mainland China to date, and while I wouldn't want to see an abundance of punked-out period pieces like this from the country, it is a long-overdue antidote to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of self-important, tiresomely nationalistic, cast-of-millions costumers that have flowed out of the country for nearly a decade now. This is like a breath of fresh air, even if much of it was previously exhaled by the likes of Takashi Miike in Japan. The fact remains, nobody was doing anything this over-the-top in China, and one wonders if this picture won't mark a turning point away from action pictures that do nothing but thump their celluloid chests. Executive produced by BOURNE IDENTITY director Doug Liman, though I suspect he attached his name after the project was in the can, as the version screened at TIFF also had the full 20th Century Fox (Asia) logo attached.