What a view | Handsome Siblings, the sword-slinging reboot of a classic Chinese story, is a visual feast

It’s an old story, but a good ’un: another version of twins separated at birth, who grow up in vastly different circumstances and later meet by chance. Predictably they despise each other. And inevitably become fast friends, then loyal fighters for a common cause. They then save the world from an evil that never quite seems to be extinguished. (If it were, how would we have sequels?)

In the newest remake of Handsome Siblings (Netflix), the latest Mandarin visual feast of an inexhaustible wuxia saga, one of the twins is deliberately schooled in sibling hatred by Lady Lianxing, the vindictive, spurned squeeze of their father. She has already dispatched him as payback for running away and shacking up with a palace servant – the twins’ mother, also summarily dispatched.

Such is the happy families set-up of a sword-slinging epic, with a whopping 44 instalments. The viewer is never far from the next thunderous showdown, steel on steel, with bad guys always outnumbering the good, and airborne, acrobatic superheroics on every side.

At times it looks like Cirque du Soleil meets Journey to the West (with haircuts by A Flock of Seagulls). But wandering warriors skilled in superhuman displays of martial arts can’t be expected to battle straightforward, ordinary villains. The outlaws they have to face down are the flying bandits of the fearsome Twelve Zodiac gang, the Broken Blade, the Cannibal, the Semi-Devil and many more, all redolent of an ultimately simple, fictionalised storybook history of perilous times now rendered in television Technicolor, and with labyrinthine, revenge-driven subplots.

Who can deny that it’s all glorious, evocative fun, venturing out there into Wicked Canyon with Mr Yan the Divine Swordsman, beyond the Thousand Miles Spice Shop and into the ’hood of the Seven Disciples of Kunlun?

Gu Long, whose 1969 novel The Legendary Twins (as it is sometimes translated) is the basis for Handsome Siblings, died in 1985, so it’s fair to assume he didn’t see television streaming coming. Which is a pity, because as well as raising hell in its action sequences and stunts, and suspending disbelief in moments of scenic sumptuousness, his once-removed offspring will burnish further the reputations of young mainland actors Zheyuan Chen and Hu Yitian, who play the twin brothers. Come to think of it, they represent a sort of 14th century, blood-related Starsky and Hutch, but without the car. Or the cardigan.

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