Starring: Joe Odagiri, Maggie Q, Tou Chung-hua
Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang
Category: IIB (Putonghua)
A pretentious exercise in ennui that will leave many viewers howling in anguish, The Warrior and the Wolf tells a tale so muddled that both warriors and wolves come across as utterly defanged. Director-writer Tian Zhuangzhuang, who based his script on a novella by Yasushi Inoue, seems so intent on creating an allegory laden with weighty truths that such mundanities as engaging the audience get lost in the process.
The weight of the stark narrative rests largely on the sturdy shoulders of Joe Odagiri. Playing the shepherd-turned-warrior Lu Chenkang, he is the movie's sole constant presence, traipsing the deserts and mountains beyond the Great Wall (magnificently filmed on location in Xinjiang province) during the Han dynasty. Other than his underlings and a succession of wolves, he interacts only with a general (Taiwanese actor Tou Chung-hua) and a mysterious beauty (Maggie Q, right, with Odagiri) whose name we never learn. The former teaches Lu how to kill; the latter, how to love. But the lessons are so turgidly administered that one wishes he had played hooky.
It supposedly has something to do with the beast inside us all. Dialogue is sparse but counterproductive, filled with truisms or laughable proclamations by Q's young widow, who belongs to a weird tribe that believes copulating outside the clan turns both parties into wolves.