It's a powerhouse three-way team-up. Lee Joon-Ik, director of King & the Clown, the top grossing Korean movie of all time, returns to the Joseon Dynasty for the first time since K&C. Hwang Jung-Min, an actor who was originally told he was too ugly to be in movies, but who has gone on take home eight "Best Actor" awards in nine years, is cast as the movie's hero, a blind swordsman. And then there's the source material, the Korean manga, Like the Moon Escaping from the Clouds which was awarded the Republic of Korea Cartoon Culture Literary Prize in 1996. The result? A muscular blockbuster with impeccable style.

It's 1591 and the Japanese are coming. King Seonjo's court is paralyzed by an internal struggle between the East Chamber and the West Chamber, each group of advisors trying to game the king. A brash young politician, Lee Mong-Hak (Cha Seung-Won, Attack the Gas Station) finally founds a rival political party to take decisive action but the wily East and West Chambers unite to have his entire alliance executed for treason.

Rather than fold, Mong-Hak, retreats and raises a rebel army in the countryside intending to overthrow the government. But as he slashes his way to power he leaves a set of betrayed old friends and traumatized victims in his wake. One of these is the blind swordsman, Hwang (Hwang Jung-Min), who decides he has to put his old friend down like a mad dog.

Full of balletic brutality, Blades of Blood is a rousing swordplay film, but it's the two lead actors, Hwang and Cha, who bat this movie between them like champion tennis players at their prime. Hwang is an unpredictable, gerning, grinning gremlin, far more authentically blind than Zatoichi, cinema's other blind swordsman. But it's Cha who steals the show. He truly believes that his ends justify his bloody means, but slowly you can see his soul start to scream behind his eyes as idealism gives way to butchery and the revolution eats its own children alive.