Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Octopus With Broken Arms

Back in the Asian Movie Corner

(In actual fact, this movie was around the corner from those, next to a poster-screen of The Prosecutor, although maybe that was sharing a screen with this today)

I wondered when looking at what was playing in the coming weeks how much continuity the Wu Sha movies have, because while I quite liked Sheep Without a Shepherd (as the first was called in the USA), it doesn't look like the second, Fireflies in the Sun, has made it to the USA at all. At least, it's not streaming anywhere, and I can't even find a Region A disc at DDDHouse or YesAsia. Which is a shame, because it's got a lot of Hong Kong talent. Anyway, it turns out that the answer to the continuity question is "none at all": It's one of those series which have some of the same talent and themes, the sort of thing that would show up under "if you liked X, then you'll like Y" if a site's recommendation algorithm is any good, but no actual links between the stories. In this case, all three movies star Xiao Yang, take place in Thailand, are written by Li Peng, and are produced by Chen Sicheng, but Xiao is playing different characters in all three; they've even got different directors. Not sure whether this one is based on a previous film or not (the first one remade Malayalam thriller Drishyam; the second American film John Q).

So, you should be able to go into this one completely cold if you want. As to whether you should…


Wu sha 3 (Octopus with Broken Arms)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I can't find if I've talked about it much in a previous entry, but Octopus with Broken Arms fits into a sub-genre specific enough that it's surprising how many entries there are: Chinese movies that take place in Thailand, but within communities where almost everybody is ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin, though all the television and conversations of people who are not Chinese occur in English. The reason why is obvious - people like pulpy crime flicks with brutal murders and government corruption and incompetence as part and parcel of the story, but you can't imply that this sort of thing happens in China, but there's a weird sort of alternate reality to them that makes things like Octopus feel weird on top of unpleasant.

It opens with a good sort of weird/uncomfortable blend, as wealthy cosmetics magnate Zheng Bingrui (Xiao Yang) watches his daughter Tingting's octopus-themed dance recital seems to take a weird, accusatory turn. Or maybe that's just his imagination, lingering guilt over her mother dying in childbirth. Soon, though, Tingting has vanished, somehow spirited out of an estate bordered on three sides by water during her birthday party. Zheng immediately suspects Shi Fu-an (Feng Bing), an old associate who showed up to ask for money, and his wife Tinaya (Zhou Chuchu), but there are eyewitnesses for his entire time on the estate. The police, led by detective Zhang Jingxian (Duan Yihong), soon focus on a mute gardener named Lu (Bokeh Kosang). When the ransom call comes in, though, Zheng bypasses the police and opts to hand-deliver it with Tingting's teacher Li Huiping (Tong Liya), but it soon becomes clear that the person on the other end of the phone, Yayin (Cya Liu) is as much interested in digging up Zheng's past as taking his 100 million baht.

There's an early comment in the film about the kidnapping being a locked room mystery inside a locked room mystery that maybe gives the cleverness of the construct a little too much credit, but the filmmakers are trying to build something intricate in roughly that same way one builds a locked-room murder. Not quite so well - there's at least one character who clearly exists because Zheng occasionally needs an escape hatch, and the film engages in unreliable narration exactly once, rather than making it an inescapable element of the story, presumably because the writers couldn't figure out how to use misdirection and so used it as a crutch. It all fits together, but it's not elegant.

(An amusing part of the inelegance is how Yayin's face is initially concealed before the revelation, not so much because we've seen her before, but because the actress is recognizable, but it's odd if you don't know who's a big name in China and may even wind up odd there if her star fades in the coming years.)

Perhaps more frustratingly, director Jacky Gan Jianyu and the editorial team don't show much of a knack for building tension and unease in any but the crudest ways. There's seldom a moment when a question hangs in the air, the audience worried about how it might shake out, with surprises generally dropped at the start of a scene rather than built to or given a moment to breathe and have the audience and the characters re-evaluate. Nearly every character has secrets to reveal such that it's hard to get a grip on who they are when all is said and done, or even get a sense of them struggling with this question. It's a movie with secrets to be revealed that's seldom actually suspenseful, and has to have newscasters telling the audience directly that this is a big deal to the wider world and folks are invested. It's not terribly long before the filmmakers are basically going with more horrific violence, particularly against children, leading to yet more devastated parents.

As such, it's not a movie for the squeamish. It has its moments, though - there's a nifty kick to the octopus-themed opener that kind of shocks Zheng with "so, octopi basically abandon their eggs and/or die", enough to wish there was more with Chloe Ye's Tingting to make her more than just a Macguffin. The filmmakers are smart to put someone charismatic that the audience can easily connect to just off center to ground the movie even if one sort of knows that this bit of grounding will be yanked away, just to keep things moving as the story gets into darker territory. When the filmmakers get a chance to do some sleight-of-hand in a chase or caper set-up, they're not bad, especially with occasionally fun angles on their Thai setting (no way not to have that giant Buddha in the scene, so let's make it interesting).

Octopus with Broken Arms is, overall, pretty capable as these movies go, and there's probably something perversely tension-relieving about these films in China, scratching an itch without a tacked-on upbeat resolution or overt scaremongering about how dangerous other places are; even the finale where a Chinese movie would assure the audience that everyone was sentenced appropriately at trial and the government was working to make sure it never happened again is replaced with something that could be redemptive or even more devastatingly bleak. If you're not in the mood for having that itch scratched, though, it can be dreary. The first Wu sha movie, Sheep Without a Shepherd, excelled because it invited the audience to enjoy the idea of getting away with things; while this mostly overwhelms the audience with cruelty but doesn't make it gripping.

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