For all its many, many faults, you can't blame Blind War for not being entertaining. And it's never more entertaining than during its first ten minutes: a courtroom-set symphony of gunfire that includes a priest opening fire on a judge, a clown getting dramatically mowed down by the police, and the pretty defense lawyer stabbing a policeman. There's a gatling gun, a flying... helium? canister, multiple explosions and a small army of policemen and criminals going at it within the building and in the street outside.
The action is.... well, it's more about quantity than quality; There are some cool moves, but the choreography is not that complex, it's not cut well, and the CGI explosions and blood effects are pretty bad. It is pretty fun, though.
During that fracas the heroic captain Dong Gu (Andy On) manages to put down the main villain, but it comes with two consequences (or CONSEQUENCES, as the Baba Yaga would say, nodding sagely): First, he's permanently blinded by a close-range flashbang detonation. And second, he earns the mortal enmity of a psychotic woman (Yang Xing) when he kills her lover.
This movie plays like a deadpan spoof of eighties action movies, starting with the fact that after all his heroics Dong Gu gets blamed of incompetence by his by-the-book boss and run out of the police force. He's understandably miffed, and has trouble adapting to his new sightless civilian life; But with the help of his teen-aged daughter, he learns that his preternatural hearing (signalled by his twitching ears, a visual device I never stopped finding hilarious) is actually a pretty decent substitute for eyesight. This is way more Daredevil than Zatoichi or Blind Fury.
Since his daughter is all he has to live for, she of course gets abducted during a trip abroad. But, get this: she gets abducted by same crime family that was on trial in that initial shootout. And it's all happenstance! They just run a human trafficking ring and she was available (in the backstage of a prestigious classical music concert - you know, the type of place lowlife thugs would normally haunt). The script (by Laogou Lin) is... well, let's just be charitable and say its sole concern is to facilitate action scenes.
When Dong Gu goes on a rampage to recover his daughter, the psycho who has it out for him sees him on TV, breaks out of prison, murders a police woman and takes her place to get close to him. "I'll get close to my enemy and use him to get revenge on the old bosses who raped me" is a novel angle for a villain, but based on the evidence here I doubt it'll catch on.
From there the duo start working their way up the crime ladder to get to the head of the trafficking ring.
Oh, and there are extremely ill-advised attempts at broad comedy, mostly thanks to a hapless local cop. They are painful to watch, and I say this as someone who's somewhat inured to this sort of sort of thing thanks to a lifetime of watching martial arts films. At one point they have the guy use the body of an innocent murdered woman as a (terrible) punchline, a rotten cherry on top of the shit pile.
Blind War is an incredibly fucking stupid movie. It's haphazardly put together (I don't normally notice continuity errors, but I saw quite a few here) and poorly conceptualized. Andy On is fine as the protagonist, but his fellow cast members have a huge appetite for scenery; It's hard to fault them for bad acting when excess seems to be their goal, but it still comes off as a little cringe-worthy.
And speaking of excess, Director Suiqiang Huo works overtime to make every single scene as epic as he can, with the result that the film becomes a extremely unwieldy. He employs speed ramping, slow motion, arc shots... it really does feel like the spoof of a heightened action movie, especially when the cameras are orbiting two people while they have a relatively non-important conversation as if it was an epic revelation. The music follows suit, and is painfully intrusive. Especially during the 'comedy' bits.
So it's a good thing that the film's got a lot of action; It's not, as mentioned above, great action, but it's frequent, loud and pleasingly excessive. It does not compare well at all to movies from the 87eleven team or (the more direct comparison) the Hong Kong action epics from the 80s and 90s, but taken as its own thing - especially when considering it seems to be a relatively low-budget title - it's... all right. Consider this a very reticent recommendation, but please don't hold me responsible for any brain damage.
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