Happy to report that, based on the evidence presented here, eighty one year old director Yuen Woo-ping hasn't lost a step when it comes to orchestrating fluent and exciting action sequences. Adapted from a successful Chinese comic series, Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert sadly inherits an indistinct, two-dimensional approach to storytelling from its source material, one that perfectly simulates the act of physically flicking through sketched situations or pouring over columns of clashing horse riders. At one point in the film a great map of the titular wilderness is revealed, said to be the life's work of a departed Khan, but Blades of the Guardians never quite manages to make us believe that its subjects are travelling these huge distances or traversing a three-dimensional landscape. For all the rushing in every direction, the locations of these warriors are dictated, primarily, by whichever battle they need to be taking part in next. Thankfully, Yuen is still very much an expert when it comes to describing these characters through their approach to combat. Wu Jing's Dao Ma, a disgraced cavalryman turned bounty hunter, adapts to the level of danger in front of him: playfully batting away nonthreatening underlings one minute then, when responding to a violent affront, equally adapt at kicking an evil nomad's head clean off their shoulders the next. Highlights include a duel between Dao Ma and Yu Shi's ghostly swordsman in a burning oil field and a not-long-enough interlude that combines Yuen's superheroic wuxia with the horse-hopping action of John Ford's Stagecoach and the swirling, computer-generated peril of Mad Max: Fury Road.