To Kill a Mastermind (1979)

One of those huge cults of martial arts assassins that tend to plague the martial world in wuxia films has grown to become a huge threat for peace and stability throughout the whole of China. The cult is controlled by a mastermind so secretive, none of his underlings have ever seen him. He only communicates with his the eight chiefs stationed in his headquarters via a curious mechanical contraption, commanding them to do the most important dirty deeds.

Things have grown so bad, the emperor has ordered a group of men to find and kill the mastermind at all costs. Apart from the villains’ secrecy, there’s the little problem that the cult’s leaders are not to be beaten through a simple frontal assault, so the emperor's men work with the tools of espionage, subterfuge, and suicide attacks – all in an attempt to turn the leaders against one another.

In fact, the good guys, such as they are, appear to have managed to place an agent inside of the highest ranks of the cult. Their identity, however, is so secret, even the audience will only learn it during the final battle, when hopefully the mastermind’s identity will be revealed as well.

Wuxia films, particularly once Chor Yuen got into the genre at the Shaw Brothers, often have a particular closeness to the mystery genre (unless Jimmy Wang Yu, stars, of course), and the search for a mysterious mastermind certainly was a pretty standard genre trope at least during the 70s.

However, the approach Sun Chung (working from a script by Ni Kuang, who wrote about a million wuxia scripts, and novels) takes here is markedly different from the more typical tale of Ti Lung walking around the martial world, asking questions and getting into fights until the final showdown, and seems to take many of its cues from procedural spy material, while subtracting charismatic figures like George Smiley or Harry Palmer from the equation.

Instead, this is a film that spends a third of its time with nameless, thankless officials giving their lives for a goal that seems perpetual out of reach, and two thirds with eight – and then increasingly fewer – paranoid killers losing patience with one another.

It’s an interesting and uncommon way to go about it, but also one that leaves the film at hand without any visible centre. There is no clear protagonist, and because the mastermind stays hidden throughout, there’s no central antagonist here either. The film emphasises this even more by eschewing any of the great – or even mid-level – Shaw stars. Everybody here is a somewhat nameless character actor – all very capable when asked, all great in the fight scenes – so there’s nobody for an audience member to project themselves onto.

This turns To Kill a Mastermind into a somewhat alienating experience, as if you’d watch a film from a place where a genre you know quite well worked under somewhat different rules you as a viewer can’t quite comprehend, and are not sure you want to.

If this is the film’s great success or its great flaw is probably more a question of personal taste than anything else. At the very least, it is certainly interesting to see so many standard tropes of the wuxia without the thing – people, it turns out! – that usually anchors them, floating in a strange sort of limbo of great fight sequences, its director’s sense for striking use of colour, and some of the prettier locations to be found in the Shaw corpus.

It’s certainly an interesting experience, and even if I more appreciate To Kill a Mastermind than love it, and am rather glad most wuxia have central characters, I am just as glad its peculiar kind of abstraction exists.