The Great Wall (2016)

China, in what I assume to be about the 11th Century C.E. Mercenary William (Matt Damon, apparently doing some kind of accent that may or may not supposed to be Irish but most certainly isn’t) and a small group of colleagues of whom only his closest buddy, the cynical Tovar (Pedro Pascal), will live long enough to be worth mentioning, have come to China to steal black powder. Not the secret of making it, mind you, these guys really seem to be aiming to cart a bunch of the stuff out of the country.

As if playing hide and seek with angry desert tribes weren’t enough to whittle a group down to next to nothing, these merry idiots encounter a lizard monster thingie, too, which they manage to kill, while leaving only William and Tovar alive. When they can’t escape the latest group of said angry riders anymore afterwards, they save themselves by surrendering to the garrison of the conveniently placed Great Wall. The Wall, it will turn out, isn’t just there to defend against human enemies, but to protect the more pleasant parts of China, especially the capital, against a horde of evil lizard thingies who pop out of a mountain every six decades or so after a meteor crashed down there.

Once they’ve decided not to kill the weird foreigners, who managed to conquer one of the lizard thingies and the two have proven themselves in an attack of the lizards, the Chinese defenders kinda-sorta bring out the best in William. Their strategist Wang (Andy Lau Tak-wa) is after all a very reasonable man, and Crane Corps commander Lin Mae (Jing Tian), after a short phase of wanting to kill William, learns to like and respect him and teaches him the meaning of fighting for things bigger than one’s own survival. Also, she’s as cute as she’s competent. At the same time, Tovar and an long-time prisoner/guest of the Chinese named Ballard (Willem Dafoe) are still very much into stealing themselves some black powder, because clearly, evil lizard thingies take the back seat for that. What will William choose, and more importantly, how dramatic will the fight against the lizard thingies get?

Historical fantasy adventure The Great Wall is a peculiar first partial English language film for the great Zhang Yimou to direct. Sure, his later Chinese films show a good idea of the marketable, and an ability to have deeply propagandistic elements stand next to others that very much subvert the propaganda again without getting himself into too hot waters with the censors. However this is clearly a film aiming to stand with one foot in the realm of blockbuster films from the USA and the other in that from and for China, and I’m not at all sure his aesthetics fit the US blockbuster market too well beyond certain critic and fan circles that won’t fill a cinema full.

It’s a bit ironic, too, for The Great Wall’s greatest strength is indeed visual spectacle, it just doesn’t feel like the kind of spectacle you get from Marvel, DC, or (Cthulhu help us) Michael Bay at all, and a mass market audience supposedly hates new things and different perspectives (even though some of the past years’ hits suggest otherwise). Personally, I am pretty happy with these parts of the film, and whenever Zhang goes for high visual excitement, the film soars, particularly because the director is free from any silly ideas of making a historically authentic epic. Instead, there are soaring scenes of masses of pretty people in colour-coded armour fighting off the genuinely excellent and inventive monsters, the absurd and utterly awesome crane diving fighting technique of the all-female crane corpse (who probably only not simply fly like in other Chinese movies not to confuse a Western audience that should be used to this sort of thing by now), the pre-climactic balloon chase(!) and more than just a couple of other wonderful flights of fancy. It’s basically a Western/Asian pulp adventure with a sense of wonder.

Of course, the pulp bit also explains the film’s weakness: the mostly bland and clichéd characterization, and a plot that seems out to exclusively hit the most expected beats at the most expected moments. But hey, at least the script contains a group of female warriors it treats matter of factly as just as competent and heroic as their peers without anybody going “you’re a woman!?” or trying to make a cut of the film in which women don’t exist.


So, seen as pure spectacle and monster-fighting, culture-uniting bit of fun, I really enjoyed The Great Wall. It certainly beats most of the other recent attempts at very consciously constructing films for the US and Chinese markets at once.

Past Misdeeds: Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


China in the 7th Century, during the Tang Dynasty. To commemorate her crowning as the first (and, unfortunately, last) Empress of China, Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) has commissioned the building of an unpleasantly gigantic statue of the Buddha pretty much next to her palace grounds. Her rather dictatorial policies have earned the Empress a lot of enemies, so it doesn't come as much of a surprise when trouble hits her construction project.

Two of the people responsible for the building of the Godzilla-large statue are killed. More surprising than the fact of their death is the way the men die - spontaneous combustion. The deaths may very well have been caused by the victims' moving of some magical pieces of script hanging inside of the statue, but the Empress is only prone to superstition when it suits her, and stays sceptical. After her chief chaplain (as the not exactly trustworthy subtitles call him) visits her in form of a talking deer and mutters an imprecise prophecy, the Empress decides that the stars ask her to put the mystery into the hands of Judge Dee (Andy Lau).

Dee isn't exactly the biggest fan of the ruler himself, what with him having spent the last eight years in one of her prisons for acts of rebellion, but he still takes on the job she wants him to do. I suspect the man just loves to solve riddles.

With the help of the Empress's closest servant Shangguan Jing'er (Li Bing-Bing), whose job it is to keep the good Judge in line, and albinotic secret police man Pei Donglai (Deng Chao), Dee begins to investigate. Despite his fabulous knowledge of martial arts and his very big brain, Dee will need all the help he can get, because he'll not only have to thwart a secret conspiracy, but will also have to escape the metaphorical pitfalls of politics and morals, as well as various pointy and sharp objects various shadowy figures want to poke him with.

One (among only a very few) positive developments in Hong Kong based movie-making of the last few years has been the return of directors like Tsui Hark and John Woo to Hong Kong and China to make decent movies again. The way their careers in the US were going, Hark and Woo would probably have had to direct Steven Seagal movies next, so their return to making actual films with actual actors again is something to make an old fan like me pretty happy.

Not that Detective Dee's director Tsui Hark - whose return to his native grounds came quite a bit earlier than that of Woo - has made much of the comparatively better working environment in Hong Kong in the last few years. Before Dee Hark's best efforts of this century have been rather pedestrian, very much giving me the impression of being the products of a man who has too many technical chops to make truly abysmal films outside of Hollywood, but who has lost the inspiration and energy of his youth without finding a suitable replacement for these traits.

This first Detective Dee movie by Hark (at least a second one will soon follow) - based on a historical character who had been a hero of legends and novels in China and was later used in Western detective novels, too - is a big step in the right direction for the director.

The film is a martial arts fantasy mystery (so at least genre-wise quite a bit like Tsui's debut movie, The Butterfly Murders) that just barely (and with more than just one unspoken yet clear "but") manages the required, undignified kowtow to the imperialist ideals of contemporary China in its final five minutes, but is really more interested in the things many of the director's best films are interested in: flying people, weird fu, the grey areas where duty and personal feelings collide, a bit of gender-bending, and Andy Lau punching out attacking CGI-deer. Not unexpectedly, this is the sort of film that might take place in a precisely located historical era, yet that only cares about the actual morals, technology and feel of its era when it's convenient or interesting, which, if you ask me, is as it should be in a pulp adventure. Plus, this approach makes the addition of various steampunk elements possible.

As a Hong Kong pulp adventure movie, Detective Dee is a lot of fun. Once the narrative gets going, Tsui basically moves from one interesting and/or fun action set piece to the next, with only a few stops for characterization, moral deliberation, and detection in the mix. It's clear that the director knows what an audience wants from its pulpy adventure movies and is all too happy to provide it.

However, it has to be said that the choreography of the action scenes (by good old Sammo Hung, no less) isn't quite up to the highest standards of martial arts cinema. While the action is certainly professionally realized and exciting, there aren't many moments here that let one gasp with excitement or be startled by the film's beauty. The action - like Tsui's direction itself - tends a bit to the safe and professional where I'd have wished for the strange or ambitious. Of course, Detective Dee's type of "safe and professional" still beats many comparable Hollywood movies - as well as far too many Hong Kong films of the last decade - in this regard, even without breaking a sweat.

Acting-wise, the film is on just about the same level, though Andy Lau and Li Bing-Bing have no chemistry at all, which doesn't help the non-fighty bits of the movie much.


Clearly, when the worst thing I can say about a new film by Tsui Hark is that it's merely very good instead of great, I'm only complaining because the film's quality shows that the director still has a great film in him and not just a pretty great one, and just hasn't delivered quite what he's capable of here.

In short: Blind Detective (2013)

Policewoman Goldie Ho (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man), excellent at the physical aspects of her work but not much of a detective, hires the blind master detective Johnston (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) to solve a disappearance that has bothered her since her childhood. Johnston likes reward money, good food, and solving age old cases for a living, so things should be set for a quick solution but things tend to get in the way, particularly Johnston's ways of finagling himself into Ho's apartment (so she can learn the art of detection from him, or was it because his own apartment needs repairs?), and using her to assist him in solving other crimes. Then there's this pesky little thing called love.

Blind Detective finds Johnnie To half-way between his most commercial impulses (the - very effective - tear jerkers that finance the films generally seen as more personal to him, though this just might be the result of a critical bias against certain genres) and his more involved films. On one hand, it's a sometimes - effectively - sentimental film full of physical humour and wild melodrama bringing together the stars of a successful romantic comedy, on the other one, it's also a film full of the visual energy and sheer imagination that makes To's films so special, and that he pares down for affairs like this. Consequently, I suspect this may be a film that won't taste quite right to the admirers of either one of To's extremes as a director.

To my own surprise as a definite non-fan of Hong Kong romantic comedy (or really, Hong Kong comedy at all), I found myself rather taken with the movie, the natural way it goes from light slapstick to outrageous melodrama to the sort of film that features a serial killer keeping quite a few corpses around his home and back again, the weird yet organic and elegant way To marries stylistic elements that really shouldn't belong into a single movie. This approach is rather typical of To of the last one or two decades, watching Blind Detective, however, never felt as if I were watching a film by a director coasting on his successes but rather a film made by a man still in love with the imaginative aspects of filmmaking, the possibilities of play, and the (perhaps childlike) joy of seeing disparate elements collide. Somehow, To also manages to make these things look slick.

While he's at it, To also makes a romantic comedy full of love gone wrong for one reason or the other, a cynical (or realist, depending on one's personal philosophy) view that again rubs disparately yet naturally against the happy end.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,comedy,crime,johnnie to,andy lau,sammi cheng

On WTF: Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame (2010)

Original title: Di Renjie

Sometimes, cinematic dreams come true and a once-loved director who has been in the dregs for years suddenly comes out on top again.

Case in point is Tsui Hark's pretty great, slightly steampunk-y mystery wuxia Detective Dee. Find out what exactly I think about the movie in my write-up on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,martial arts,wuxia,mystery,reviews,tsui hark,andy lau,li bing-bing,carina lau,deng chao,other places