The Chinese Empire is under attack by the Tartars. While heroic general Yue slowly takes the lost territory back piece by piece, the traitorous prime minister plans on selling out to the invaders. Yue's success is a problem for his plans, so he acquires a royal order that will call Yue back from the front and leave the way open for his newly made allies. To make sure the order really arrives, the minister orders it engraved on twelve gold medallions, each of which will be transported to the frontline by a martial arts expert of great talent and dubious morality.
There's more than one patriotic fighter who wants to prevent the order's delivery. Especially effective in getting rid of the mercenaries is Miao Lung (Yueh Huah), a former student of the sword style of Jin Yang Tan (Cheng Miu). Little does he suspect that his master has heard the siren song of power and influence and has just been awarded the leadership of the martial arts school whose main reason for existence is the delivery of the medallions.
As soon as he learns this, Miao Lung's sense of duty and honor compels him to break up his engagement to Jin Yang Tan's daughter Jin Suo (Chin Ping). Her father uses the opportunity to convince the girl that Miao Lung has fallen in love with another woman.
Both men don't know that Jin Suo herself has also gotten into the medallion interception business.
If you think this should be enough complications for one film, you probably haven't seen many wuxias. The film finds time - without breaking a sweat, I must add - to also concern itself with the destiny of many other honorable and dishonorable fighters, betrayal and tragedies and even with a little comic relief.
But it is doubtful that the story will end in laughter and not in blood and tears.
Cheng Kang may not be as well known a Shaw Brothers director as Chor Yuen or Chang Cheh, but this doesn't make his films necessarily less interesting or less individual efforts.
The Twelve Gold Medallions for example is a film that tries to re-invent the classic wuxia formula in a way very different from Chor Yuen. Where Chor opts for conscious artificiality and stylization, Cheng uses a more naturalistic approach with as much location shooting as possible and stages that are (quite effectively) filmed to look as natural as possible.
The fight choreography is in part done by Sammo Hung and has a certain grittiness even in its more wacky moments. Most of the fights are relatively short, but bloody and intense. The high amount of different fighters helps to keep each battle unique, while Cheng's dynamic and fast camera work adds a further dimension of intensity to the proceedings.
The action is of course not all that's important in a wuxia. The Twelve Gold Medallions is not stingy with its melodrama and entwines it nicely with the action. Where weaker genre entries too often keep the emotionally tense moments and the action divorced from each other, here the melodrama lends additional tension to the action and is used to up the stakes so that more interesting things than the fate of a nation are in the center of the movie.
Acting and production values are as good as one can expect from a Shaw Brothers film. I must say I would have preferred less hissy fits by Jin Suo, whose childish behavior is unfortunately not untypical for women in films like this, but if it says something very positive about a film when that's the worst criticism I can come up with.
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