Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate, even if it's just heading to the movie theater to check out the big holiday blockbusters.
Although one is, frankly, busting more blocks than the other; when I purchased my tickets a few days ago, both were in Causeway #6, one of their large rooms. But while Detective Chinatown 1900 was ready to fill up for its 6:30pm showtime, it was basically just me and one other person for Hit N Fun at 9:30pm, so they moved that to a smaller room (#10) and put another show of DC1900 on. The funny thing is how they handled assigned seating: The app still had me in seat C11, although I'm pretty sure that this would have placed me in the handicapped seating, while the ticket I printed out had me in I20, or as far back and to the left, viewed from the back of the theater, as you can get. Which, considering how I tend to be front and center, and slightly to the right if I can't be on the centerline (left ear better than the right, so that kind of balances things), is not a great guess. Fortunately, I could check Fandango and see that the front was wide open and just grab my usual seat B10.
Anyway, it's a busy year for Lunar New Year movies, the busiest in some time: DC1900, Hit N Fun, and Creation of the Gods II this week, Ne Zha 2 on the 14th, Tsui Hark's Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants on the 21st (hopefully in 3D), and Dante Lam's Operation Hadal on the 28th. Hopefully it's a good one as well; both of these are decent but with room to be a bit better.
Tang Ren Jie Tan an 1900 (Detective Chinatown 1900)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Does the propaganda get laid on fairly thick toward the end of Detective Chinatown 1900? Yeah, absolutely, but it's not like the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't a real thing, and it's not like there aren't parts of the movie which are uncomfortably topical today. I'll give it to them, even if it might be a somewhat bitter pill for the potential Western audience pulled in by the promise of a fresh start and some familiar faces.
As it opens, there is upheaval on both sides of the Pacific, as the Western powers are looting Beijing and Empress Dowager Cixi (Xi Meijuan) dispatches investigator Fei Yanggu (Yue Yunpeng) to San Francisco to track down rebel Cheng Shialang (Ke Bai aka White-K). He is supposed to be met by some noted detectives and translator Fu Qin (Liu Haoran), but Fu is left on his own and taken in by the head of the Hip Sing Tong, "Louis" Bai Xuanling (Chow Yun-Fat), who is due to address the city council on a plan to greatly expand the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act which would have the city reclaim the land under Chinatown. It's being supported by ambitious politician Grant Jones (John Cusack), but everything is thrown into chaos when Grant's daughter Alice (Anastasia Shestakova) is found dead, stomach gutted in a manner reminiscent of Jack the Ripper, with witnesses placing Bai's son Zhenbang (Steven Zhang Xincheng) at the scene of the crime. Also found dead is Navajo chief Six-Hands, who often came to Chinatown to trade furs; and his son "Ghost" Gui (Wang Baoqiang), a Chinese orphan adopted after his parents died building the railroad, must team with Fu Qin to solve the mystery.
There's more going on - an Irish labor gang, a stage magician, more bodies eventually to come, all running at a breakneck pace that's nevertheless impressively coherent given that the credits show both series mastermind and Dai Mo as directors and a whole slew of people contributing to the screenpay. I would not be shocked if the studio were throwing everything they could at the movie to meet a Lunar New Year release date - Chen's previous film, Decoded, came out just six months ago and you wonder if he just asked Cusack to hang around because he had another movie that could use an American shooting the next day - and it's kind of shaggy in that way, as well as in all the other ways Chinese movies with American parts often are: Lots of guys who are clearly Twenty-First Century Russians and who clearly don't speak English as well as Chow Yun-Fat.
Mostly, though, it fits nicely into the series, delivering very broad comedy which often gives way to a surprisingly good murder mystery, maybe the series's best since its first entry. There'a a lot of activity going on, but it's seldom wasted or purely red herrings, and the characters dive in rather than wink at the audience. As usual, you can tell Chen Sicheng loves this stuff; the film comes alive when it's time to reveal all, and if he's hidden a conversation or two, it's not like it's material you can't figure out. There's a very nifty chase in the middle which is full of slapstick, western, and wuxia bits, and a somewhat sillier (but still fun) set piece ahead of it. Mixing things up and throwing other genre elements in at times seems to have revitalized the returning cast and crew.
If the chemistry between Liu Haoran and Wang Baoqing isn't quite what it was in the first film, their parts are a little more balanced than they were in the last couple movies, where the growing confidence of Liu Haoran's Qin pushed Wang's Tang back into a more purely comic relief role. Here they both get to play fishes out of water and bounce off each other in entertaining fashion, and they've got a nice brace of folks supporting them, with Yue Yunpeng and Wei Xiang particularly good at playing their parts as both comic and potentially more than they appear. As in Decoded, John Cusack is kind of an odd presence in the film, in that his comfort in English can make him seem like he's underplaying relative to the other "Americans", but he grounds the climax surprisingly well.
And most importantly, there's Chow Yun-Fat in his first role in five years (One More Chance was delayed by Covid), and he's been missed. He goes from comedic mugging to fearsome authority as this film goes on, and his ability to switch between Mandarin and English lets him pull that off in all of his scenes - if he's dubbed, one wonders why nobody else is dubbed that well. He's giving a speech at the climax and seems earnestly at a loose end at the finale, the film's secret weapon except he's no secret.
(On the other hand, one cannot help but notice that nearly none of the women in the film get to actively do anything, and a lot of Navajo are played by Chinese actors for a movie that leans pretty hard on how racist Americans can be at points.)
Chow's maybe not quite enough to elevate this film where it gets rough, and you'll never really miss the rough spots, but DC1990 does just enough of the things I particularly like about the series fairly well, so that I wound up enjoying it quite a bit.
Lam Si Kyut Dau (Hit N Fun)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Hit N Fun looks like it's going to be a broad, silly New Year's comedy as it introduces its characters and sets up their situations, but winds up going in another directions, like these goofballs haven't quite been made goofy enough and the filmmakers have grown too fond of them to really have fun at their expense. That's far from crippling, but it does mean that there comes a point where the movie is more pleasant than hilarious. Which is still a net positive, and I've got to admit, I don't really know where the zany version of this story would go.
It opens in a dingy muay thai gym in Macau; Bruce Chung Li (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) was once a legend with an unbeatable left fist but he and student Stallone Ko (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung), who has lost 37 straight matches, have been catering to senior citizens and children ever since word got out that he lost a fight to disciple Arnold Chan (German Cheung Man-Kit). Across the estuary in Hong Kong, advertising executive Elsa Lam (Louise Wong Tan-Ni) is bouncing between multiple appointments, including a voice over for "Meno-Peace" where the actress, Bruce's wife Carrie Mok (Gigi Leung Wing-Kei), has not been told what the material is and still isn't ready to be associated with that sort of work at 48; her agent Bridget (Yeung Sze-Man) is Elsa's aunt. That's when Elsa discovers that her boyfriend Daniel (Peter Chan Charm-Man), has another girlfriend, Surewin Suen (Chrissie Chau Sau-Na) - Macau's women's champion, Bruce's former student, and the face of Arnold's gym. Humiliated when their conference goes viral, Elsa shows up at Bruce's gym and offers 200,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $25,000 US) to teach her to fight.
Are there a bunch of nutty coincidences in that rundown? Yes! But that's kind of what makes it work, early on, where a sudden turn around the corner brings them back into familiar territory but from a cock-eyed view, and we get to wonder how the intense Elsa is going to play off the laid-back Stallone, or note that the bad blood that apparently festers between Bruce and Arnold doesn't keep Carrie and Surewin from being friends. There's comedy to be mined from Carrie's vanity or how this insecure artist has drawn the attention of two highly driven women. It should be an invitation to entertaining chaos, but never quite is. The initial friction between Carrie and Elsa vanishes so quickly that it's genuinely weird for the former to be describing the latter as a bitch by a half hour into the movie, for instance, and nothing really develops with Arnold being money-hungry.
At times, it's almost like the characters get too well-rounded. Gigi Leung, for instance, is given what should be a one-joke caricature and somehow makes this kind of shallow and vain woman who hasn't come to terms with her aging very funny and sympathetic without being maudlin, and there's an enjoyably understated opposites-attract thing going with Louis Koo's curmudgeonly Bruce; Koo's "uhh" when Carrie suggests Bruce train her for an action movie suggests he's known this would be a bad idea for twenty years. Louise Wong snaps out orders that make Elsa seem like she's abrasive and a lot but also not unsympathetic, and German Cheung briefly works as an entertainingly exaggerated take on everything one hates about the gym. At some point, though, they all seem to become too aware of their precarity and how the modern world can make comic characters tragic in a second, and there's not much of a back-up plan. There's really no reason for Elsa and Surewin to fight, let alone Bruce and Arnold; instead of the story leading everybody to weird places, it's easy to see them deciding to be mature about everything.
That said, when they are going for the big joke, it tends to land pretty well; Gigi Leung and Louise Wong are especially funny, as is Wong Wan-Ching as the daughter of Bruce & Carrie who is easily as smart as the two put together. Nobody really has a joke die on them so much as the jokes get smaller. It being Hong Kong, even a comedy knows what to do with a fight, from the slapstick chaos of Elsa's first confrontation with Surewin to a finale that is kind of unblinking in how, on a certain level, these two really want to beat the hell out of each other but are also very grateful for rules that tell them that this is enough. That one is intercut with the duel between Bruce and Arnold that is shot in a completely different way; they are expert fighters but their battle seems abstracted more than violent.
It's an enjoyable enough movie to see on a holiday, I suppose, although more a bonus-lazy-afternoon holiday than a big one where you're making a lot of noise. It's not quite tradition, but it's fairly nice.
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