Another week, another pair of Asian imports that I don't get around to posting about until one has played for the last time in the Boston area and the other is reduced to short filler duty. I'm kind of (but not quite) surprised that
A Gilded Game is the one sticking around;
Trapped seemed the better movie but maybe
Game had better star power. A quick look at the
Chinese box office seems to indicate it opened bigger in China as well, although
The Dumpling Queen opened a day earlier and has grossed as much as these two put together, and, good lord,
Ne Zha 2 is just a long-lasting beast that may have passed
Titanic as the #4 movie of all time if those numbers are to be believed with
Avatar 2 not out of reach.
Doesn't look to be anything from China opening this weekend, so that's a bit of a breather.
Lie Jin · You Xi (A Gilded Game)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
It's been almost a whole year since a movie directed by Herman Yau played theaters. That's a long layoff for the guy who seems to be the busiest filmmaker bouncing between Hong Kong and the mainland; glad to see he's all right! Kind of a bummer about the movie.
A Gilded Game> isn't bad, really, so much as it's another movie like last week's
The Dumpling Queen that kind of straddles the China/Hong Kong border by necessity and kind of feels like it belongs in neither.
As it starts, Goa Han (Oho Ou Hao) is graduating from college, eager to work in an investment bank ("ibank" in the subtitles, though it's not clear if "i" is for "investment" or "internet"), though his parents would prefer he take the civil service exam. As soon as he's about to give up, he gets an internship at the local office of international firm Blue Stone, though that may owe as much to his friendship with Chu Zhihong (Chang Chenkuang), the son of hydropower start-up founder Chu Feng (Jasper Liu) as his skills. He nevertheless scores "Master" Todd Zhang (Andy Lau Tak-Wah), famous for his exhaustive vetting of potential IPOs, as a mentor. The focus on due diligence doesn't particularly fit with the plans of interim CEO Helen Li (Crystal Huang Yi), who dislikes Zhang's investor focus and is planning to feed Chu's company to another client.
A Gilded Game is a movie about the stock market, and for as high-stakes as investments can be both in film and real life, they are also by their nature opaque, putting a layer of abstraction between investors (or audience members) and the operations of both the companies they finance and the brokers who trade them. Because of that, it's tough to make a movie that really sucks you in; stock market plots that are tricky enough to fool the victims in a movie are almost by their nature complicated enough to confuse the audience, and what can be done without slowing the movie down makes smart characters look foolish. That's kind of what happens here; it's never complicated or nasty enough to be really thrilling.
Indeed, the movie reserves its almost cartoonish edge, such as it is, for its villainess and not much else; with Crystal Huang Yi chewing more scenery than the rest of the cast combined. It's kind of amusing, especially considering how nobody else in a business that should be a viper's nest feels very far from nice. Oho Ou Hao, for instance, plays Gao Han as an earnest and pleasant young man to the point that even his inevitable heel turn never feels real; he comes across as a good kid pretending to be a bad guy. Andy Lau plays Zhang as persnickety but the film not only doesn't take advantage of the mean streak he can bring but give him regular scenes with Ni Ni as a nightclub singer who used to be engaged to Zhang and is still very friendly despite pledging not to marry him after his stock tips bankrupted her father. It's a strong effort to make sure we like him.
(It's kind of amusing that this movie from Mainland China seems much less harsh on the whole profession than an American movie would, even though the film is constantly having characters fly to Hong Kong to do stuff at that market as opposed to, say, Shanghai. Is it considered shadier in the Mainland? Is the mood in China to encourage entrepreneurship and investment in Chinese businesses but to be wary of this capitalist structure? I'm kind of curious what the attitudes in play here are.)
Yau's a pro, though, and he and his crew do what they can to make things entertaining; the movie is fairly fast-paced and he indulges in a little trashy melodrama when the film is threatening to bog down. It doesn't always work - you can only add so much bombast to such a timid script - but the film has the soundtrack of something lurid and exciting even if the actual caper or finale is kind of mild. And, if nothing else, props to Andy Lau's costumer, who gives him charming bow ties and pastel shirts that scream "I was with this organization back when it was just a small, non-evil investment firm" in a kind of charming way.
There are just enough odd tidbits to keep the movie running so it's not quite dull, but it's never quite exciting, either, and this continues all the way through a wrap-up that dutifully informs the audience that everyone who committed an illegal act went to jail in a manner that's so obligatory as to be deflating.
Da feng sha (Trapped)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2025 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Trapped is the sort of action movie you go to without a lot more than a plot description and an open evening and soon raise your eyebrows, realizing that this is going to be a
fancy one, with the muted cinematography and the camera moving in unconventional ways and the fractured timeline and violence coming either after a jittery little ramp-up or with no warning at all. It's enough to make one sit up a little straighter and pay a little more attention, and that tends to be warranted: It's a nifty siege movie that doesn't let its ambition become pretentiousness.
As the film opens, it's 1995, near Mangya, a small town where China, Mongolia, and Tibet meet, that's about to clear out ahead of a major sandstorm. Smuggler Zhou Beishan (Xin Baiqing), has arranged a jailbreak that involves him being rushed out of prison in a coma; lieutenant Qu Maduo (Geng Le) has gone ahead to tell Li Hong (Lang Yueting), the lady who runs the place's diner, that he's coming and she knows what he's looking for, which pushes her to send her sister away. An emergency had them stop at a highway gas station and leaving it a mess, which the local police chief Xia Han (Bai Ke aka "White-K") decodes all too well. Beishan and his men are familiar with Mangya, and are able to isolate it; meanwhile, Xia's three-man police department only has one gun between him, rookie Jian Ning (Sun Ning), and a former tour guide.
This is obviously a Western - band of outlaws, a couple folks in jail because they were fighting over who was rustling whose herd, desert bordertown, haunted sheriff with green deputies, no-nonsense lady running the local saloon - but it doesn't necessarily feel like one. Maybe its the setting, which despite being in the middle of the desert is dense and maze-like compared to a wide-open main street where duels might happen, with brutalist statues and monuments you'll really only find in the People's Republic of China. Maybe it's the colorful group of henchmen, who are definitely crime-movie guys rather than western guys. The upshot is that while the plot is familiar, It almost feels like director Zhang Qi and his co-writers hit upon the central elements of the genre independently without copying the aesthetic.
Zhang and company start the action up quickly despite the cops' relative paucity of firearms, and the staging is generally strong, too, building up to a big final confrontation. It builds to an impressive crescendo, and frequently shocks because it's got enough bad guys who trust each other about as well as you might expect this sort of criminal to that when one knocks off another, it doesn't necessarily make the gang less of a problem for Xia Han but does leave the audience a bit unsure where things are going to go next. Zhang makes solid use of that tension even when the movie is not exactly pushing relentlessly ahead.
It works in large part because there's a nice tension between the grandiose and the restrained: For as much as Leishan starts out seeming fearsome because he's a smart villain who plans ahead, the natural rival to the disciplined, thoughtful Xia Han, his plan is rather big and silly when you get right down to it, and Xin Baiqing has the loose, cocky confidence of someone who would risk that escape plan knowing he'll come out okay, even before the last act has him start to seem unstable. Bai Ke is his obvious counter as Xia Han, carrying a heavy load of guilt but still a consummate professional, not really trusting anyone else to do a job with lives on the line but never quite belittling them. There's a fine rogues gallery of gangsters who may or may not stick around very long - most striking, perhaps, is Li Gan as the silent, almost spectral sniper Tongue - and Lang Yueting nails the part of the former lover is
probably not pulled in by Leishan anymore, but maybe at the start, but has points where you don't know whether the connection's still there or if she's putting on a front to protect the other hostages.
Those hostages kind of come and go, as Zhang often seems to be focusing on the central characters to such a point that one can lose track of there being potential innocent victims, and getting back to that makes the end drag out a bit. That's kind of an issue with the fancy action movies; they tend to get attached to some thing or other that feels profound to the filmmakers but may not hit with the audience. Zhang mostly avoids that here, and it makes
Trapped a nice surprise among more recent mediocre Chinese imports.
