In short: The Meg (2018)

While it certainly inspires not even tiniest bit of entertainment or excitement in me, and its main claim to fame should be the dubious success of making a film about Jason Statham fighting a giant shark that’s bland and lifeless, at least Jon Turteltaub’s giant monster movie stinker that’s beat by a couple dozen SyFy movies made on a fracture of its budget in entertainment value did finally help me come up with a theory why so many American/Chinese attempts at blockbuster co-productions are so bland and lacking in any kind of personality.

My hypothesis is that it’s focus groups that are to blame (adding another sin to the kind of amount that’ll make Satan uncomfortable). First, the script and later the film are run through the Chinese marketing expert rat labyrinth, losing about half of any possible personality in the process, yet leaving at least the sort of thing a Chinese audience supposedly enjoys in. Then, this half-living thing goes over to the American side who cut exactly the fifty percent of life the Chinese side left in, because an American audience surely won’t enjoy those, resulting in a film that may feature little to nothing anybody in any country could actively hate, yet also one that has nothing anyone could get even the tiniest bit excited about. That’s my theory at least.


In The Meg’s particular case, things are not helped along by an incredibly antiseptic “romance” between Statham and Li Bingbing – both of whom deserve better than this crap – and a script that isn’t just a series of boring clichés, but a series of boring clichés presented without any conviction or sense of drama by a director who seems to be aiming for the the new Academy Award for most complete absence of personality by a director. This is not so much a film that’s bad as one that can’t even get up the energy to be anything that lively. I could go on and enumerate the film’s flaws in detail, but honestly, what’s the point?

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: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Remember Alice (Milla Jovovich), superpowered action heroine who lost her superpowers without, you know, the film she was in actually letting her fall back under the cruel rule of gravity? The film at hand will continue to have Alice act as if she still had superpowers even though it's a plot point for the film's stupid, stupid ending that she hasn't.

Anyway, our heroine is in the hands of the evil Umbrella Corporation again and has to escape some ridiculous underground zombie outbreak simulation facility below Siberian ice. Oh, look, she's picking up a little girl, because you can't make a female-led action movie without a girl for the heroine to protect, otherwise the male audience would run away in fear, or something.

Various other favourite characters from the videogames pop up without bothering to provide any character beyond a check mark next to their names: Li Bing-bing as the only actual actress in the movie is wasted on Ada Wong, the horrible Sienna Guillory does a horrible Jill "Mind-controlled" Valentine, Leon Kennedy and Barry Burton make an appearance, and Boris Kodjoe reappears as last movie's Luther West, without any of them making any impression.

The film also finally realizes the awesome possibilities the cloning parts of its background provide and makes some of the bad guys clones of dead characters from earlier movies; which, alas, means the return of Michelle "One-note" Rodriguez, but hey, it's not as if the film then does anything of note with her or any of the other returnees. Part of the problem is that director/writer Paul W.S. Anderson really seems to think in the audience will not only remember the "mythology" of the previous films but also care about it, and so stages every stupid nothing as if it were of wide interest and deep import when all anyone will actually remember of previous movies will be zombies, explosions, shooting, slow motion, and the immortality of Wesker.

Like the last two or three Resident Evil games, Retribution has also long since given up on pretending to have anything at all to do with horror. Zombies really only make some small guest appearances, for this is not a crappy horror movie but a crappy action movie, so there are gun battles in slow motion, people walking in slow motion, slow motion monsters, slow motion explosions, and slow motion fights as if Anderson had been cursed by the ghost of the first Matrix movie. I haven't measured it exactly - for that would have meant going through this thing a second time - but I'm quite sure there are more slow motion scenes than scenes filmed at normal speed; if he could, Anderson would film the dialogue in slow motion too. I know it's not the done thing to criticize people's fetishes, but Anderson's slow motion fetish really goes too far. Especially since this overuse of slow-motion isn't just tacky and stupid (hey, it's a Resident Evil movie, so that's to be expected) but also drains any possible excitement out of the action, turning every fight into a matter of endurance for the ill-fated viewer.

On the positive side, at least Retribution (I have, by the way, no idea why it's called that way) isn't one of the action movies where you can't see anything that's happening for all of the fast editing; it's unfortunate that what the film shows in its action scenes isn't actually worth seeing.

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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