I'm kind of upset that I didn't get to see it in Imax earlier in the week. It got two days on the giant screen in Assembly Row, but the first aligned with the day all the theaters were closed due to snow, and then I opted for the secret show at the Somerville on the second day with no regrets. I'll bet it's a heck of a thing to see in one of those D-Box or 4DX theaters that shake you around.
Oh, something kind of amusing is that, while it's very easy to come across a lot of social media and economics articles about how Chinese electric vehicles are going to upend the motor vehicle world order, I just randomly saw that a whole bunch of Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers have gone bankrupt in the past few years. It puts a fair amount of the plot of Pegasus 2 into focus (Zhang Chi was sponsored, you may recall, but a company that had been making devices somewhere between golf carts and mobility aids for the elderly but were expanding into full-size EVs) and how this one starts (they are bankrupt).
Fei Chi Ren Sheng 3 (Pegasus 3)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), Pegasus (Prime link), and Pegasus 2, or buy the first on DVD at Amazon
When I watched the first two Pegasus movies a couple years ago, I made the kind of flip comment that as a writer/director, Han Han was a very good racecar driver. This is still more or less true, although he's improved just enough over the course of this series that the parts of the movie that aren't folks behind the wheel are only a bit of a slog and the parts that are make them worth it.
In the last film, Zhang Chi (Shen Teng) and Li Xiaohai (Fan Chengcheng) won the final running of the Bayanbulak rally, but it was not enough to save the electric vehicle company sponsoring them from bankruptcy, though Zhang, his navigator Sun Yuqiang (Yin Zheng), and mechanic Ji Xing (Zhang Benyu) received the factory as a new venue for their driving school. It's only losing money slowly when they are approached by SKYLAD executives Cai (Sha Yi) and An (Duan Yihong) to head up a national team to compete in the new Asian Muchen 100" race, although friction with the company's European partners and a disastrous qualifying round lead them to team up with rival Manager Ye (Wei Xiang), now working as a rideshare driver, to form a "privateer" team.
This set-up is, quite honestly, kind of brutal to sit through at times. Han Han and co-writers Zhou Yunai & Meng Wenyu have happily remembered that the first film was a comedy and are managing to keep things lubricated with the occasional joke here (the second, for better or worse, played things fairly straight), but there is still a lot of awkwardness in the script and editing, as a fair amount of information gets repeated early on while at other times the plot seems to hinge on technical details or the politics of how these teams are selected. There are something like ten drivers of some consequence to the story though only a couple are fleshed out at all, which is kind of a problem when you get to the big rally and everybody is wearing the same sort of jumpsuit and the color-coding is not nearly enough to remind you of what the dynamic between this guy and Team Zhang Chi is while a lot is going on.
(And on the one hand, props for at least recognizing that doing so much damage to the hero car that it needs to be almost completely rebuilt has happened a lot over the course of the series, and the metaphor of how, Zhang Chi will push things to the point of disintegration and self-destruction loses power with each iteration; on the other, they keep doing it!)
The core cast still works, though. Shen Teng may get stuck with a lot of lousy dialogue early on, but he absolutely gets that, like a lot of elite athletes, Zhang Chi is a sweet guy with a hypercompetitive monster inside, even if he's maturing into someone who can control it, and Yin Zheng does will making Yuqiang a man who is a natural sidekick. Zheng Benyu plays Xing as a big, goofy engineering savant, while Sha Yi and Duan Yihong make Cai and An into folks who can more or less get away with stabbing people in the back because they don't necessarily like the system they're in. Wei Xiang often proves to be the MVP, though, with Ye seeming to struggle to hold his tongue even as he's being glib early on and, after announcing that the team needs "a villain", embracing that role with relish.
The main event, though, is the major race that takes up basically the second half of the movie and may occur in what amounts to real time. Han has kind of cleverly lowered expectations by making the qualifying segment dangerous but also a bit anticlimactic, and also created a sort of split course that allows the two cars on the team to deal with different challenges rather than repeating everything (although the rules this time around feature much more head-to-head competition than the rallies in the first two films). He spends a lot of the early going yammering on about tires in a frustrating way, but thankfully pays it off in an unexpected but exciting manner, and from then on, the race is on, gorgeously shot with fairly seamless visual effects, often putting racers in dangerous positions but in a casual way that balances the thrill of how folks could get killed in really impressive fashion if they missed a cliffside hairpin turn at 150 kph with how these guys are clearly good enough that having one tire winding up in midair during such a turn is an expected part of their strategy. As the race takes Zhang Chi & Sun Yuqiang through a bunch of different terrain and conditions, Han turns out to be really good at giving the audience necessary information at speed and both tossing in and keeping up with situations that have these seasoned pros quickly glancing at each other as if to say "can you believe this?", eventually racing to a photo finish.
That back half is seldom truly showy as opposed to filled with well-composed shots and beats that are individually fairly plausible but pile up in impressive fashion without stopping for a flashback or any such similar nonsense, until by the end you realize that this race is one of the most impressive sustained action sequences going. It doesn't exactly make the early going better, but it certainly makes it worth sitting through. It must be amazing in the deluxe auditoriums with personal subwoofers enveloping screens, and maybe that explains why this has been the big hit of the season in China, because it definitely won't be the same when reduced to fit in one's living room.
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