Product Details

• Actors: Brigitte Lin, Andy Lau, Tsui Kam-Kong
• Directors: Taylor Wong Tai-loi
• Format: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Japanese
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Cav Distribution
• DVD Release Date: October 1, 2002
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000066C7Z
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #449,077 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good movie, shame about the DVD!, June 17, 2001

By 

"geotec" (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Three Swordsmen (DVD)

I'm usually a Jet Li/Yuen Woo Ping fanatic, but I figured I could do with a change, so I got this to see some sword play, as opposed to my usual fill of straight up fisticuffs.

The film was alright, but if you haven't seem them already, I'd suggest seeing 'The Swordsman 2' or 'New Dragon Gate Inn' before seeing this.

My major gripe with this movie is with the format, this is basically another bog standard VHS->DVD conversion. The picture is grainy, the sound is so so, and the subtitles are white and imbedded in the picture, as opposed to being selectable. As is always the case with these types of subs, there are sections in the movie where they're unreadable!

To sum up, if you've 'seen everything' and feel like a change, go ahead and give this movie a spin, but if you've already got/seen the VHS version or like your Hong-Kong action without the tongue-in-cheek, I'd give this one a miss.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars sonnyreview, March 4, 2002

By 

Son Thanh Nguyen (Springfield, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: "Three Swordsmen, The - Pt. B " [VHS] (VHS Tape)

If you gonna get good action movie titles from Brigitte Lin ,buy - Dragon Inn,The East is Red(SwordmanIII), Swordman II, The Bride With White Hair(skip the part 2) , The Dragon Chronicles The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains, Deadful Melody, and for Zu: The Warriors From Magic Mountains - I find myself falling asleep not because of the plot but of age. If there is a remake of this movie by Yuen Wo Ping as martial art director with Brigitte Lin is gonna be a hit(it is my wish)

Anyway, With The Three Swordmen, you have to force yourself to watch to the end just to understand the plot. The martial art action is not so .......If you want my opinion, you can skip this one; unless you want it just to collect DVD.

2.0 out of 5 stars Convoluted, boring piece of eye candy, May 6, 2010

By 

Celeste Chang (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Three Swordsmen (DVD)

Well, if you want to watch a super-powered Andy Lau (playing "Smiling Sam" or whatever the subtitles call him) flying about through a confusing mess of a plot (something about him being framed for murder and theft and him going on the run to find the real culprit...oh, just go watch "The Fugitive" instead!) you might be able to stay awake through this. But most of the fight scenes aren't even that exciting because 1) the actors aren't real martial artists 2) Andy Lau's character pretty much easily outclasses everyone else 3) half the time it wasn't clear what was going on or why they were fighting. I mean, there's one bit where Andy says "There's something wrong with the ground!" and starts attacking the FLOOR! Seriously.

The title is "Three Swordsmen". The other two are apparently the Saber/Dao guy (Elvis Tsui) who's the one chasing after Smiley, and Sword/"Ming Jian" (Brigitte Lin). We don't even see Brigitte Lin until 1/3 or 1/2 way into the movie, and then she doesn't do all that much. Plus, she's playing a man for some reason (and dubbed by a man in the Cantonese version - that was awful! Just let her speak, sheesh. If we can suspend disbelief about her appearance, then we can do it for her voice, too.) What, she got too typecast after the Swordsman movies? (At least it made some kind of sense there!) They could have just changed the gender of the character. (Like they did for her character in the "Handsome Siblings" movie.) And then there's a whole clan of people in furry coats, now mostly in some kind of prison camp, except for the princess who married into the Ming family and her little sister (who's in love with Smiley). There was some kind of feud, but I have no idea what it was all about. The movie opened with a lot of "As you know, Bob" exposition, but my eyes glazed over and all I heard was "7 years ago blah blah blah killed blah blah blah imprisoned blah blah blah married blah blah blah..." Anyway, these are the three in competition for the "Number One Fighter" prize this year. So yeah.

The whole thing had the feel of being adapted from something even longer and more complicated. Little tags appear each time we get a new character or location on the screen, which is not uncommon in Chinese movie versions of "classics", where it's assumed people already know the story. So maybe that helps if 1) you can read Chinese and 2) you had a f***ing clue what it was adapted from. After some googling, I found that it seems to be based on "Saber Sword Smile", a Cantonese manga. Which I've never read, so I have no idea how much it was butchered to be made into a movie (but I can guess...)

It's not the worst wuxia movie ever, but I can't really recommend it.