Starring Lin Ching-Tai, Umin Boya, and Vivian Hsu. Rated 18A.

The Wushe Rebellion was an ultimately doomed aboriginal (Seediq) uprising against Taiwan’s Japanese occupiers in 1930. It gets the blockbuster treatment in Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, but in fusing two previously released films into one internationally tailored, 155-minute orgy of decapitations and mystical rainbows—coproducer John Woo is suspected of inspiring some of the film’s overripe poetics—writer-director Wei Te-Sheng ends up with something almost as unwieldy as that title.

Still, it’s a very fast, frequently exciting action epic, not to mention uniformly picturesque. Besides the outrageous number of beheadings, the real reason to see the film is Lin Ching-Tai. As the glowering village chief Mona Rudao—once a great Seediq warrior, now reduced to sucking on a pipe for 30 years and stopping the young’uns from ruffling the Japanese police—Lin provides all the internal conflict that Wei’s historically blurry script asks of him. Falling somewhere between a beefy Toshiro Mifune and supercranky Henry Fonda, the nonactor is a riveting presence.

The film’s lyrical side works best in a lovely scene in which Mona’s dead father tells him (in song form, no less) to get back to his roots and make “real humans” (seediq bale) out of his depressed and oppressed people. From here, Rudao makes the decision to lead the disparate Seediq villages in their “blood sacrifice” to their ancestors—regardless of the devastating price.

Besides wondering what Hollywood would have made of the morally complicated slaughter that follows, you can’t help but think that those missing 120 minutes could have cleared up some of the film’s ambiguities, like the nature of the antagonism between Mona and Temu Walis (Umin Boya), from another village. And you might as well assume that some of the subtitling doesn’t help. Unless I have my Taiwanese history wrong, I don’t think the natives were using the phrase “take it easy” back then.

Watch the trailer for Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale.