Mission Impossible (1971)

The Golden Dragon sword has been stolen and the emperor is desperate for its return, lest it bring about calamity. An honorable hero recovers the sword but is mortally wounded before he can return it. He tasks his daughter and best student with delivering it safely.

For the first hour or so Mission Impossible has a standard wuxia plot, with the sword serving as a McGuffin to send the heroes on a quest and the reason for them to be attacked at every opportunity by groups of outlandish villains. The plot is pretty thin and not entirely coherent, but the action is plentiful - it moves from fight scene to fight scene with minimal downtime.

If that's all the film was it would be a passable time waster but mostly forgettable. The action is fun, featuring fanciful choreography with lots of trampolines and reversed footage and surprisingly dramatic undercranking for the period. It doesn't have the exquisite staging and pacing of a King Hu film but there are some imaginative shots.

Things take a surprising turn in the final act though, with a twist so sharp as to constitute a change of genre. I didn't see it coming, though in retrospect it is foreshadowed. We are denied the conventional wuxia ending where the young heroes team up to mete out justice to the villain in a final showdown, but he gets his comeuppance in arguably a more satisfying way.

Joseph Kuo's direction is too superficial to fully do justice to the film but he does bring a fun style and energy.

Ching Li gives the heroine a stately grace that's quite different from the intensity of most contemporary swordswomen, cast in the Cheng Pei-Pei mould. Chen Hung-Lieh brings that elegant, smiling menace that he did so well to the chief villain, and is quite rightly billed as the co-star over Chiang Nam, who is a much less significant presence.

Despite being a Shaw Brothers production (Kuo's first film for them) it appears to be largely shot in Taiwan, with the Shaw Brothers studio used for certain scenes. This makes it an interesting curio, somewhere between a typical Shaw Brothers wuxia and those from Union Films.

The execution is a bit too sloppy to give it an unqualified recommendation, particularly in the first half, but it does have enough that is unique to make it worth a watch for fans of the genre.