The synopsis on the back of the DVD relates that a king who recently subdued a minor state hopes to win over a powerful noble (played by Jimmy Wang Yu) to his side, and this noble has no greater earthly desire than to possess the finest and rarest swords. Thus the king organizes a dueling contest to lure this noble into his service by offering a generalship and a rare sword as the winning prizes.

I thus expected that the end result of the movie would be that Wang joins the king, only to re-discover his patriotism, and slay the conquerors of his city to liberate his people.

The movie turned out totally differently, and was more of a morality tale than anything else. As the plot unfolded, Wang does get the much coveted sword from the king, but he then hears of another, even more unique sword and goes to seek it out. His obsession totally corrupts him and he turns into a villain, murdering a retired swordmaster to get this 2nd sword.

In his triumph, he tries to pull the sword from its scabbard and fails, and when old Taoist sage passes by, he angrily demands to know why this sword is stuck. The old sage merely smiles and says that sword is truly unique because it had not been used in 20 years (and so it has rusted in the scabbard).

Wang Yu's character then has an epiphany and the movie ends with him bowing in remorse to the corpse of the old master. It is an unsettling, tragic ending. In a strange bit of make-up, his eyebrows merged into one while he was being evil, but in the end, they recede away and he has two normal eyebrows again.

Over all, the actors do a fine job, but I would've liked better action. The slow sword fights pale in comparison to the dazzling acrobatics seen in Shaw Brothers films from mid to late 1970s and early 1980s.

If you want lots of energetic fights where you can cheer the hero beating off hordes of baddies, as I had hoped for, this is NOT the movie for you. It is really a character development drama, and while it is poignant and fairly well done, that's not the reason I buy and watch kung fu movies.