The first laugh in the martial arts quest thriller “Nine Ring Golden Dagger” might be its title. It was called “Blocking the Horse” in China. And the “dagger” that was mistranslated here is a sword attached to a seven or eight foot pike.

And the second laugh is in first title to appear on the screen in it. This movie is “purely fictional,” we’re reaassured.

Those two sword-fighting sisters who struggle with a brawny sea of sworn enemies over a “Nine Ring Nation Stabilizing Golden Sword,” warriors flying with the aid of springboards and wires and shooting hailstorms of arrows and crossbow bolts and swinging clashing, clanging and cutting blades that mainly deliver survivable wounds are all just made up.

Good to know.

The Song and Liao factions are fighting over the lands of the Han Dynasty, either before or after its breakup (that’s unclear). The Song General Yang (Wue Yue) lost the titular golden dagger/sword/pike and his life in battle.

Weeping sisters Baba and Jiumei (Tianshuo Song, Xintong Zhang) resolve to retrieve it from a Liao stronghold. They dress up as soldiers and have no trouble at all passing for cute, thin fighting men or infiltrating this fortress capital and the Indiana Jones-booby-trapped room where the sword is kept.

They survive wounds and a chase by assorted minions of a security chief (Yu Kang, et al) and take shelter in a roadhouse run by a Song expat (Kai Zhang) ready to return to their homeland. A mistaken identity brawl is how they get acquainted.

“How do you know the Yang family sword-fighting technique (In Mandarin with English subtitles)?”

“Find out in HELL!”

After they figure out they’re on the same side, they’re all basically trapped there for much of the movie as waves of bad guys overtake them, and partake in the house wine before figuring out these are the droids sisters they’re looking for.

The bar brawls are impressive and alternately bloody and low comedy amusing. There’s a towering waiter and diminutive cook sight gag, a foppish foe related to the Liao dowager empress and a lot of strangely survivable slices and impalings as every time you figure that’s it, it’s CURTAINS for this or that protagonist, they somehow rally with a balm or wave of the (three) screenwriters’ hands.

There’s so much exposition and so many characters that the picture is awfully cluttered and even hard to follow before the narrative settles down in that one important location.

Choreographer Gao Meng’s fights are less impressive than the state-of-the-wirework art films in this genre, but pass muster in what amounts to an overpopulated but handsomely mounted martial arts B-picture.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Tianshuo Song, Xintong Zhang, Kai Zhang, Yu Kang, Liu Xinlei, You Xianchao and Wue Yue,

Credits: Directed by Feng Xiaojun, scripted by Gen Zi Qi, Xu Wen-Zheng and Chen Peng. A Well Go USA/Hi-YAH! release.

Running time: 1:34