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<p>Its very difficult to describe <i>The Blade</i> effectively without sounding like a complete film student. While it's nominally a remake of of a 1967 <b>Shaw Brothers</b> sword fighting flick, <i>The One Armed Swordsman</i>, it takes elements from the fairly formulaic Hong Kong sword fighting genre and recombines them to make something, well, strange and violent but poetic at the same time. This movie exists in the same strata as <i>Hard Boiled</i>, <i>The Road Warrior</i>, or <i>The Wild Bunch</i> in the way it effectively uses realistic, graphic violence as a way of expressing poetic ideas. But it also draws from more existential and mannered schools of filmmaking, pulling visual ideas from such diverse directors as <b>Antonioni</b> and even bits of <b>Coppola</b>. </p>
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