Review By Kamal K
"Into The Badlands" thrills in its nimble genre. Even more striking is its impressionistic world-building, skillfully painting a feudal society a few centuries beyond our own, outfitted with Studebakers and Saarinen chairs and dressed in bowler hats and bustles.
There are no guns but plenty of fists courtesy of the highly trained armies of enforcers known as Clippers, employed by the seven resource-hoarding dictators called barons who rule over the South.
The most feared Clipper is Sunny (Daniel Wu, the American-born veteran of a slew of Hong Kong marital arts films), in the employ of the supremely Darwinian Baron Quinn ("Power is not inherited," Quinn sneers at his wife as she tries to position their son as his successor. "It is taken.")
Raised from an orphan by Quinn. Sunny is a lethal warrior and trusted advisor, unquestioningly loyal -- until a chance meeting with M. K. (Aramis Knight), a teenager on the run, and a revelation by his secret sweetheart Veil (Madeleine Mantock) make him question his calling. At the same time, Quinn, who controls the manufacture of opium, faces a power grab from an upstart baron called The Widow (Emily Beecham), who has raised a fearsome all-female army of her own.
The stakes are set up efficiently, and Wu is marvelous in the fight scenes and solid elsewhere as the impassive and improbably named Sunny (the series is loosely basely on a 16th century Chinese picaresque "Journey to the West," about the Monkey King Sun Wukong). But the scene stealer is Beecham, whose cunning and ambitious Widow is no slouch in the blood-shedding department. She's every bit the badass as Sunny, only in a bustle and black leather stiletto boots.
"Into the Badlands," only six episodes to start, is not without its flaws -- the dialogue is often leaden, and some of the secondary characters are little more than tropes. But the show's high style, intriguing machinations and kinetic fight sequences.