I Know Who You Are

So, is there anything coming out next weekend where the politics might be dodgy, especially considering where it comes from? Because that's kind of been Sundays for the past few weeks, and it's starting to get weird.

I'm actually surprised, looking at the Chinese box office, that this looks like it's kind of a moderate success in its native country; just looking at the description, it looks like it might be the sort of thing that might be a big hit because folks are "encouraged" to watch it. But maybe not; like Unidentified a couple weeks ago, it might be more like a movie set against this background than one pushing it. The last two huge hits in China appear to be a couple May Day releases, drama Dear You and thriller Vanishing Point, which didn't play Boston even though it apparently did get an American release.

Anyway, it's genuinely weird that China Lion decided to open the movie about cops spying on their neighbors Fourth of July weekend.


Zhua Te Wu (aka I Know What you Are)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #7 (first-run, laser DCP)

I Know What You Are feels like the kind of movie you make after your authoritarian government that pits its citizens against each other falls or reforms, and maybe China has, at least compared to the period depicted, but not enough: The censorship/propaganda ministries still have enough influence on the film industry there that the filmmakers can only really poke around the themes that might make this movie really interesting.

It starts in 1949, just after "Liberation", as the Republic of China forces retreat to Taiwan, with spymaster Yan Diankun (Yu Hewei) installing agent 5182, schoolteacher Feng Jingbo (Hu Ge), in an apartment and instructions to listen to a shortwave radio, although he soon attracts the attention of policeman Xiao Dali (Lei Jiayin) as another spy escapes. Xiao installs his family in the same apartment complex as Feng - wife Liu Yaqin (Chuai Ni) teaches at the same school - but Feng seems to anticipate his moves, marrying former brother maid Da Meizi (Zhang Yao), and as their families grow closer over the next 40 years, Feng loses contact with his handlers and integrates himself into the community, even as Xiao's continued obsession makes him look paranoid.

Sort of by necessity, Feng never seems to be a terribly committed spy, even from the beginning; though his recruiter mentions "three principles" as a justification for the Nationalist cause, but there's never much sign that Feng believes in them and why, which means that the latter half of the movie can't do much to raise the question of whether he has become a true believer in the People's Republic or if he's just learned how to quote Mao and the new Constitution as camouflage. There's potential drama and tragedy in the idea that Feng has reformed but Xiao (and the state) cannot let the pursuit go, or that Feng is committed to his cause but ultimately abandoned, but if he's going to be anything but a pure villain in a Chinese film, his actual work for the Nationalists is going to have to be abstract and minimal.

This doesn't stop writer Shi Jianquan (working from a Zhang Ce novel) and director Feng Xiaogang from getting something from the scenarios; there are some nifty bits as Jingbo is actually trying to perform his mission and Dali attempts to catch him early on - not exactly complex spycraft, but the seemingly low stakes add a spark of comic absurdity - and the time-jumping, generational nature of the narrative makes the latter acts especially poignant, as Dali's grown son Xinwei (Lin Xioafan) and Jingbo's daughter Kangmei (Yang Shuyi) are practically already family aside from being in love and their fathers' opposition is the only thing keeping them apart.

It's clumsy getting from one state to another, though. Meizi's evolution as a character feels like the filmmakers need her to suddenly be much more perceptive and mature at a certain point (or much less so toward the start), and while that can come from marriage and motherhood, it's clearly a character that needed to fill two different roles at different times and minimal effort was put into reconciling them. Because of the time jumps, a lot necessarily happens off-screen, but some of them feel pivotal enough and close enough to what is shown that the film would really benefit from showing them, while others are oddly ambiguous - near the end, Xinwei and Kangmei suddenly go from the heart of the film to maybe or maybe not being married offscreen despite their fathers' forbidding their relationship, and the final flash-forward feels like it could be talking about either them or their kids being a couple!

The performances wind up being roughly as good as the script will allow - with so much jumping forward in time and trying to keep the situation static, Lei Jiayin often kinds up looking kind of inept even as the film ultimately wants to portray him as loyal and doggedly determined, while Hu Ge seems to play Feng's attempts to present fealty to the PRC as clumsy and superficial (indeed, he's kind of at his best trapped in a loveless marriage early on, and I feel like there's a good movie to be made about this pairing of an intellectual and a worker just not working despite how they claim to aspire to a classless society). The supporting cast has more room to move Chuai Ni is sneaky-great as Dali's wife, often presenting as kind of oblivious to his investigation of Jingbo but a big-hearted force of nature in handling the families, and while Zhang Yao never quite marries Meizi's ignorance at the start to her fierce pragmatism later, her dramatic moments outweigh her early comedy. Lin Xiaofan and especially Yang Shuyi give the audience a lot to hold onto as likable, seemingly normal people hurt by their parents' pasts.

Feng Xiaogang's early films, especially, had a keen satiric edge beneath their absurdity, and the film is at its best when he has a chance to bring that out. When he's going hard at making state security look like neighborhood busybodies, pointing out all the mismatches that Mao's ideology has disastrously engineered or how shutting down the brothels forced many women out of a comfortable life, showing how much more vibrant the town became when a little free enterprise was allowed, and the final irony about how this thing that ruined two families' lives was basically forgotten by those who set it in motion, that's when you can see a potentially great movie, especially as the neighborhood evolves as time passes while retaining its basic character.

But, for whatever reason, he doesn't make that movie; he makes one where the characters' actual beliefs are never important even though it's supposedly driving a conflict that lasts decades and the harm done can never be acknowledged except as necessary for the greater good, and how can you walk out with a lump in your throat unless you're already sold on the whole thing?

Cold War 1994

I've been complaining a lot about the multiplexes only showing things at 4pm, which is probably nice for seniors and students but is not great for those of us who can't ditch work terribly easily and maybe can't easily fit a mid-to-late afternoon movie in on the weekend. Sunday wasn't quite my only opportunity to see Cold War 1994, as AMC seemed to sell enough tickets to put late shows on Saturday & Sunday, but 10pm wasn't that much better for me than 4pm. They haven't added any later shows for the workweek or put it on the schedule for next weekend yet, although I wouldn't be surprised to see it get another week - it was much more crowded than some of the other non-mainstream films I've seen there of late and it can't bee that hard to sell a movie with Daniel Wu, Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Yuen Biao, Terrance Lau, etc., to folks who like Hong Kong action.

I also wonder, a bit, how the protracted development time for Cold War 3 led to the filmmakers opting to go the prequel route. There were four years between the first two movies that were supposed to take place right after each other, and four years after #2 would have bumped them not only against the pandemic but the 2019 protests. As much as you'll notice a lot of Hong Kong crime movies being set pre-1997-handover so that they can have a police corruption angle, I suspect that post-2019, there's probably also a lot of pressure to avoid showing contentious politics in the Special Administrative Region. These movies haven't been about ideology so much as maneuvering, but that may be just as bad, with China not wanting to present the SAR as being at the whim of petty grievances and personal ambition, and those were the engine that the first two movies ran on.

Hopefully it gets extended in Boston and plays elsewhere (EDIT - it has, but all afternoon shows other than Sunday the 17th at 6pm), because it was very easy to miss if you weren't actively looking for this sort of small release!


Han zhan 1994 (Cold War 1994)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2026 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link for Cold War II), or Cold War II Blu-ray at Amazon

Cold War 1994 manages to pull off an impressive trick, in that it's the first time I can recall watching a movie and thinking "I wish Chow Yun-Fat were in this a bit less". Not because of anything Chow does - perish the thought! - but because the story being told in flashback is good enough that there's no need to cut away from it until the end, and doing so eats a little momentum. Not much, but just enough to notice or make one wonder if maybe this was envisioned as a streaming series that wound up good enough to cut into a feature.

Those bookends take place in 2017, six months after the events of Cold War & Cold War II, when Hong Kong's Chief Executive-elect Adrian Yip Shun-Ting (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) has asked lawyer Oswald Kan (Chow Yun-Fat) to vet M.B. Lee (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), the former chief of operations for the HKPD for a Cabinet position, despite his having resigned in the aftermath of Operation Cold War. Kan is incredibly thorough, and when current Police Commissioner Sean Lau (Aaron Kwok Fu-sing) arrives to inform him that Lee has vanished after an apparent break-in, Kan reveals that he has found a file from British Intelligence detailing a case from over thirty years ago.

In 1994, Lee (Terrance Lau Chun-Him) was the head of Team A of the Organized Crime and Triads Bureau, and after one of his men loses some seized cocaine, he begins an unofficial operation to recover it, leading to "Tiger" Fong (Pang King-Chee); the operation turns deadly when it turns out that Fong is also involved in a kidnapping and Lee has stumbled upon where Fong's men are holding their hostage. That hostage is K.F. Wong (Carlos Chan Ka-lok), Chairman of the Global trade group and husband to Rosa Poon (Fish Liew), tenth sister of family patriarch Sir William Keswyk Poon (Tae Kwan-Ho), who has had his son Simon (Wu Kang-Ren) summon Police Commissioner Dickson Hui (Michael Chow Man-Kin) to make it clear that he and Hong Kong's other wealthy families have paid a cumulative two billion Hong Kong dollars in ransom over the past decade and need the kidnappers put down hard. This falls to his chief of operations Peter Choi (Daniel Wu Yin-Cho), who is none too eager to retire in tandem with Hui as part of the coming handover and sees an opportunity to emerge in a position of greater influence. He intends to use Lee as a pawn, but Lee, when suspended and cut off from his OCTB team, forms an uneasy alliance with Jodie Yuen (Louise Wong Dan-Ni), the new boss of the Lo Yuen crime family which Tiger Fong usually serves.

Having just re-watched Cold War II in preparation (at the present moment, it is much easier to stream in the USA even for those who don't have an import Blu-ray than the first film), and it was a bit of whiplash to see Terence Lau's M.B. Lee so soon after Tony Leung's older version: Both are impulsive, with young Lee a driven rule-breaking detective while older Lee is more defensive and concerned about his job/legacy, and while one sort of expects maverick cops to evolve that way if the rise in the ranks rather than dying or being booted from the force, it's harder to see Leung's Lee in Lau's it is to see Chang Kuo-Chu's Peter Choi in Wu's (though, to be fair, Choi was a much less consequential character in the original films than I remember, actually only appearing in the sequel). More amusingly, it looks like they have tweaked the timeline a bit so that the 2012 original takes place in 2016 rather than the 2016 sequel taking place in 2012, probably to explain how Lee had an adult son on the force without any indication he was a family man in 1994.

Those coming into the movie cold because it's a big Hong Kong blockbuster with a stacked cast don't have to worry about that, though, and will likely have a great time for the same reasons that the other movies were hits: It's a dense thriller where director "Longman" Leung Lok-Man and his co-writers do a nice job of suggesting a ticking clock while still having a chance to explore seemingly every conceivable angle. There's cops of various levels of crookedness, of course, but also time to ponder on how succession plays out in these large family businesses, or how rocky a newly-invested mob boss may be, or how the British aim to maintain influence in the Crown Colony after the handover. It's a busy, busy movie, but the filmmakers juggle especially well to keep from either sprawling or bringing something up because it would logically be important but quickly finding a way to marginalize it. Its period setting is probably also clarifying in some ways, as the writers have had thirty years to ruminate upon and re-examine its issues rather than trying to be topical in a way that may age quickly - in the way that Hong Kong films are not allowed show (successful) police corruption after 1997, they likely can't show the sort of political infighting that fueled the first two films after 2019 for similar reasons.

The three showpiece action sequences are also pretty great: There's a fine shootout near the start, yes, but the motorcycle chase in the middle is fantastic. Not only is it fast but clearly legible despite being at night, it frequently turns surprisingly nasty and cements the (probably not romantic) chemistry between Terrance Lau and Louise Wong; it's not hard to imagine this script streamlined into something just built around them. Even the many-things-go-down-at-once section is strong, bouncing between different sorts of tensions rather than presenting concurrent gunfights.

Nice cast, as well; I've mentioned that I don't really connect Terrance Lau's M.B. Lee to Leung's, but he's a strong lead and pairs well with Daniel Wu's ambition. Louise Wong is often the movie's secret weapon - the film never explicitly states that Yuen is disrespected as Boss because she's a woman but her every bit of body language suggests that she knows she's an unconventional choice and there's a target on her back for it, and she absolutely can't afford any Romeo & Juliet nonsense with Lee. Tse Kwan Ho makes William Poon intriguingly multifaceted despite being situated squarely where one expects the real rich monster of a villain to reside. The film is absolutely packed with impressive stars in smaller roles - Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, and Louis Koo in 2017 and FIsh Liew, Cecilia Yip Tung, Karen Mok man-Wai, Michael Chow, Yuen Biao, among many in 1994 - some of whom one might expect to have more prominent roles in Cold War 1995 (or Cold War 3, should that ever happen) even if they aren't holdovers from the previous films, while others are there to lend gravitas or establish exactly who they are in a movie that doesn't have a lot of time to introduce everyone individually. This even extends to the Brits, with Aidan Gillen and Hugh Bonneville a cut above the folks usually playing these roles.

(It does not include Sammo Hung, despite his being listed on IMDB and receiving a "thanks" credit; perhaps scenes with him as the boss that the others members of Lo Yuen are mourning were cut, or maybe there are just plenty of photos with him and Yuen Biao together as younger men to be used as props)

As mentioned, the film ends with a tease for Cold War 1995 and leaves a lot to be wrapped up there. Hopefully it won't be quite so long a wait as between the other films, and not just because Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Aaron Kwok can't defy time forever; this is a very satisfying thriller that nevertheless leaves the audience wanting plenty more, whether they've seen the rest of the series or not.

Lunar New Year 2026: Pegasus 3

So, as we go to Pegasus 3 in what isn't quite Causeway Street's largest screen, how's it doing in China? As of today, $514M in the 11 days since Lunar New Year, which is a bit more than Scare Out, Blades of the Guardians, Boonie Bears: The Hidden Protector, Panda Plan 2, Night King, and Per Aspera ad Astra put together. I don't know that it's an insane juggernaut like Ne Zha 2 was last year, but it's a big 'un.

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.

Lunar New Year 2026: Scare Out

I was going to stagger these a bit, but Thursday showtimes are very weird this week, so it looks like I'm doing this on Wednesday and then crossing my fingers that nothing messes with getting to the last screening of By Design on Thursday, before getting back into the Lunar New Year material as Hong Kong comedy Night King, Korean drama The King's Warden open Friday. It looks like the Vietnamese family film that was going to open isn't anymore, and Pegasus 3 will play Assembly Row in Imax on Monday & Tuesday and then open on regular screens at Causeway Street next Friday. Still no word on Panda Plan 2 being inflicted on Boston, for better or worse.

Anyway, this one's a lot of fun, although the sudden realization that I recognize the source material toward the end kind of threw me and, well, spoilers down below!


Jing zhe wu sheng (Scare Out)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2026 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it when available and aw dang, the movie it reminded me of is a cheap 4K at Amazon!

Me toward the start of Scare Out: "Man, Zhang Yimou making a modern high-tech thriller is weird!" Me toward the end of Scare Out: Wait, is this a remake of AMERICAN MOVIE X? A Mainland Chinese movie can't end like AMERICAN MOVIE X! To be honest, I kind of wonder if that revelation is leading me to be a bit harder on the film than it really deserves; it was maybe a little than fine but now I was focused on what it couldn't do.

It opens with a State Security team tracking a foreign tourist about to receive stolen property, with Deputy Team Leaders Haung Kai (Zhu Yilong) and Yan Di (Jackson Yee Yangqianxi) co-ordinating on the ground and tech Chen Li (Lin Boyang) monitoring surveillance and controlling drones from the mobile headquarters. Things go sideways, and during the debrief, it's announced that rather than promote one of the two deputies to fill the empty Team Leader position, the agency is instead installing former colleague Hong Zhao (Song Jia), who reveals to the pair that the enemy may have a source inside the team, albeit in the early stages, more developing a source than controlling a mole. Huang Kai and Yan Di quickly realize that Hong Zhao is focusing her attention on them, and both may be compromised: Yan Di was contacted by ex-girlfriend FeiFei, who had been living abroad since they broke up, during the operation, and Huang Kai has been carrying on an affair with Bai Fan (Yang Mi), who has some video files of her own to hold over his head.

Scare Out is actually Zhang's third straight release set in the present (though the first was held up in the censor bureau long enough for him to shoot several of the historic dramas he's better known for), and it shares an LED-lit aesthetic with Under the Lights that's as intentional and well-designed as any of his costumed epics. The screen is filled with glowing arcs overlaid with digital annotations, as if all the information of a modern surveillance state combined with a canny quarry that knows every step that will be taken to catch them will inevitably send everybody in circles. As with that previous film, this may not be Zhang's traditional milieu, although he does occasionally do things that remind one of his roots, like a character in 2026 taking an arrow to the throat out of nowhere.

The trouble, perhaps, is that this is a slick thriller whose audience knows how slick thrillers work, and tips its hand early without enough characters to give screenwriter Chen Liang a whole lot of options for potential twists, until it gets to the one it can't entirely commit to. Zhang and company don't draw it out too far - it turns out that you can, apparently, still make a 105-minute thriller rather than bloat up past two hours if you try - although even in its tight time frame, you can see the story start to run in circles and work a bit too hard to link what really shouldn't happen this quickly up with what shouldn't take this long.

The vibe is good, though; it's got a cast full of actors who know the trick to speaking with crisp professional efficiency while not entirely coming off as robots, with a special shoutout to Yang Mi, whose Bai Fan is absolutely aware that she's the femme fatale in this situation and doesn't play coy. The moments of sudden violence tend to work even if they're not always entirely original (I suspect it's bad luck that one bit of action is awfully close to a gag in last month's The Fire Raven which was much more free to play it as potentially-fatal slapstick), and even when it's got to keep pushing past its logical endpoint to please the censors, the filmmakers manage to do so without feeling like they're undoing or reframing a bad situation as positive.

After watching the film, I looked up the one that I remembered and realized that I've actually seen three versions of the story. Gun to my head, Scare Out is probably the third-best of them, but it's a testament to the good skeleton created almost 80 years earlier that it updates pretty easily, and Zhang and company execute very well (as much as some have commented on how oddly conventional this recent run looks, the present does occasionally seem to see him reinvigorated and trying new things).

<SPOILERS!>

I don't want to leave folks hanging about which movie I was thinking of; so I'll just say that toward the end, I kind of sat up straight and said, wait, this is No Way Out, isn't it? After sleeping on it, I'm a bit less sure: It's been some time since I saw that movie, probably when it was playing on cable or UHF in the early 1990s, so I don't recall it very clearly beyond the last-minute revelation that Costner wasn't the murderer, but he was a spy. It probably followed the plot of The Big Clock pretty closely, which Scare Out doesn't, particularly; Yan Di doesn't really have anything to hide until the last-minute revelation that I saw coming and recognized. The hook for The Big Clock is "man innocent of murder nevertheless has a secret, reputation-damaging connection to the victim that would make him the prime suspect if revealed", and it's one of the great noir/pulp/thriller plots, universal enough that even things that aren't exactly remakes/adaptations contain a lot of its DNA. Scare Out is kind of adjacent to that - Huang Kai is not yet guilty but realizes that he's being developed as a source and is trying to figure out how to avoid his guilt being discovered, though it's not initially clear that he intends to frame Yan Di.

That said, the finale twist is absolutely right out of No Way Out, except that what that movie does - reveals that the sleuth had a lot more to lose than we thought and that his promotion in the wake of solving the crime would cause bigger problems - is just out of bounds in a Mainland movie; the security services have to be on top of it. So the shocking revelation's got to play out long enough to say, no, State Security is going to ultimately be on top of it, and while I think it handles that all right - Yan Di is notably miserable rather than vindicated as a result - it may still be working too hard after the story is essentially finished. Amusingly, that final scene lifts a lot from Infernal Affairs.

I do kind of think No Way Out is a pretty direct ancestor of Scare Out, even if the filmmakers wound up working backward from the finale rather than forward from the premise; the vibe is too close. Maybe not quite a remake, though.

Also, I really should watch No Way Out again, since I vaguely recall that the protagonist wound up being revealed as working for the Chinese rather than the more-typical Soviet Union, and it would be hilarious if China remade an American movie with Chinese-aligned villains into one with American-aligned guys.

<!SRELIOPS>

Lunar New Year 2026: Blades of the Guardians

Just for fun, let's look at the first day of Lunar New Year at the box office in China!

Whoa, the movie that's getting the biggest push for the first few days, Blades, made a respectable $19M, but the movie that's getting the second-biggest (and looks like it's sticking around more during the weekend), Scare Out made #34.4M! And the number one film in China for this day was Pegasus 3, pulling in a staggering $92.5M and as near as I can tell is not opening in Boston (I've seen dates of the 23rd and 27th, so maybe AMC's waiting to figure out where to put it). Panda Plan: The Magical Tribe is supposed to open mid-March, and I'm as shocked as anybody that China demanded a second Panda Plan.

Of course, the other thing is that the Lunar New Year movies in China fluctuate like crazy over the first month or so, like the country of over a billion collectively decides to see one movie first, then catches another a few days later, and then a third the next week, so the top three wind up making the same amount. That doesn't happen in the USA very often - something has a bad first couple days and it's not even getting evening shows on Thursday - and I must admit, I do kind of envy that China has the sort of situation where things can build word-of-mouth that way.

But, enough about box office - the important thing is that we seem to be off to a fun start of the festivities!


Biao ren (Blades of the Guardians)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2026 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or buy the manhua at Amazon

Fair warning: The title that displays during the opening credits for this movie includes a colon, meaning that 81-year-old director Yuen Woo-Ping, directing his first full feature in about eight years, apparently intends at least one more episode and you're not necessarily going to get a full conclusion with this one. You get enough, though, as Yeun presents a big-budget wuxia adventure with swordfighting and charm to spare.

It starts with bounty hunter Dao Ma (Wu Jing), late of the Left Valiant Palace Guards, and his seven-year-old traveling companion Xiao Qi (Ju Qianlang) tracking down a fugitive but offering to let him go if he pays triple the bounty. He's after bigger prey in Two-Headed Snake (Max Zhang Jin), but also gets offered a job as a general by local lord Chang Guiren (Jet Li Lian-Jie), but prefers the freelance life and his home in Mo Village. Returning there, he's given a mission by elder Mo Lao (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) to deliver China's most wanted fugitive, face-painted revolutionary Zhi Shiliang (Sun Yizhou), to Chang'an. Also along for the ride are Mo's spirited daughter Ayuya (Chen Lijun), just extricated from an arranged betrothal to the heir to another clan, Heyi Xuan (CiSha), and Ayuya's guardian Ani (Xiong Jinyi). They'll be pursued along the way by every mercenary in the land, most notably Dao Ma's old comrade in arms Ting Di (Nicholas Tse Ting-Fung) and his partner (Liang Biying), eventually forming an uneasy alliance with Jade-face Shu (Yu Shi), who has his own prisoner Yan Zinang (Li Yunxiao) to deliver to the capitol.

That's a lot going on, but, some of these folks in the long list of cast members are basically guest stars so that Yuen and his action team can mix and match opponents and have Dao Ma face new challenges regularly rather than and endless series of rematches, and will exit in relatively short order (it's not uncommon for someone to have their name and position put up in subtitles and then be dead less than ten minutes later). The action kicks off in earnest with a three way swordfight between Wu Jing, Max Zhang, and Jet Li, and while they've all maybe lost a step compared to ten years ago, it's a heck of a great battle that establishes the way Yeun and his team are going to stage things: There's a fair amount of wire-fu going on, but they won't be defying gravity nearly as much as the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or The Matrix. There are three or four more standout action set pieces after that, including a fantastic centerpiece in the middle of a sandstorm and a finale big enough to get past when it's holding things back.

What makes it better is that while Yeun Woo-Ping's fight choreography tends to be imaginative and brilliantly-executed, what he, choreographer Dang Shan-Peng, and action director Ku Heun-Chiu do here really manages to give it solid emotional beats: Early on, it's easy to take Dao Ma preferring to extort than kill for just wanting money, but as the film goes on it becomes clear that he would really rather not, to the extent that a particularly striking and vicious kill indicates that he's angry and done messing around; at another point you can see that a typically capable character is swinging her sword too broadly and that this will cause her downfall. In some ways, Ayuya's arc is entirely told through action, from the cheery trick archery of her first appearances to the angry stabbing at the finish. Perhaps the only real flaw is that Dao Ma and Ting Di look too similar on first glance; yes, they're meant to be reflections of each other, but when the camera gets too close or the motion too quick, it can take a half-second too long to recognize which tall bearded guy in matching black armor we're looking at.

Wu Jing is the charismatic one, at least in this film; though he gained attention among action-movie fans for his martial-arts prowess in Hong Kong, he's spent much of the past decade in China becoming a more versatile leading man, with even his action roles being more military or science-fictional. Here, he's able to give Dao Ma a light enough personality that the darker turns the action takes later aren't revealing that as a facade but showing a guy who has been trying to live a good life and hates being forced into this much violence. He plays especially well off young Ju Qianlang, and fits into a fine ensemble: Chen Lijun is an enthusiastic princess with room to grow, CiSha really nails the charming prince who has a sadistic streak underneath, Yu Shi and Li Yunxiao have a chemistry that suggests Shu & Yan could be more than captor and prisoner but doesn't insist upon it. Sun Yizhou kind of feels like a placeholder as Zhi - the character never feels like someone who can be the threat to the emperor through sheer force of personality - and one wonders if the filmmakers are kind of hedging so they can define him better in later installments. On a more positive note, "Big Tony" Leung Ka-Fai and Jet Li deliver different kinds of gravitas in their roles as elders.

The scenes that Wu Jing and Jet Li share early, whether talking or fighting, put a big grin on my face, and not just because Jet Li is a presence too seldom seen on-screen since some health problems and a turn toward philanthropy (this is his first film in six years). Wu is the closest thing there is to being Li's heir, a screen fighter who burst on the scene with sheer punching ability but developed a genial screen presence along the way, and it's nice to see the torch passed on-screen without getting maudlin about it. I'm not sure how many more adventures there are for Dao Ma in the original manhua, but I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more on future Lunar New Years. It's got the soul of a western (right down to the stagecoach) and the action of a wuxia.

From the Chinas: Busted Water Pipes & Back to the Past

Chinese box office numbers are crazy - I've got no idea how accurate the page I usually use is, because the numbers can be absolutely all over the place, with mega-blockbusters just absolutely rocketing through the top of the scale and head-scratching results like Return to Silent Hill having twice the opening of Busted Water Pipes last weekend, because the former is both foreign and bad, and, also, what do movie tickets cost in China, because these aren't big box-office numbers for a country of over a billion people?

At any rate, both these movies arrived in Boston this weekend, which was probably the roughest one for something to show up in North America of the new year so far - Send Help was probably the intended main attraction but Melania certainly looks like it took a number of screens out of circulation via four-walling and Iron Lung got a whole bunch of screens despite apparently not advertising much to movie audiences at all (I didn't see a single trailer in front of any sci-fi/horor/indie genre entry all month), although it probably has a ton of online fandom that I'm just not aware of because I don't game. As a result, these were scrapping for showtimes at the start of the weekend; I had to leave work early to get to a late afternoon show of Busted Water Pipes and Back to the Past was playing very early and very late at Boston Common on Saturday and Sunday. Apparently, though, you sell out a bunch of those shows and they'll find room; it's now got a full screen at Causeway Street and more accessible showtimes at Boston Common.

Personally, I like Busted Water Pipes more; and it's kind of a bummer that it's getting student/senior-friendly times at best and might be out of town after Wednesday - definitely worth catching if you get a chance!


Busted Water Pipes

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2026 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Busted Water Pipes is one of the more impressively ridiculous movies I've seen lately: The filmmakers are committed to just piling one more bit of silliness on top of another for the whole running time, keeping things so far over the top that it can even ramp up the violence as it goes on while still feeling more slapstick than black comedy.

It opens with a hostage rescue in the capital city of fictional kingdom Ronham going spectacularly wrong, and the cop who led it, Yu Dahai (Eddie Peng Yuyan) transferred to the small town of Hoping even though it was his superior with political aspirations who provided bad information. A bona fide supercop, he basically wipes out crime in Hoping while waiting to be brought back, and seven years later that means the police station in this town could be shut down as an unnecessary expense. What he and his co-workers don't know is that Dahai's friend Luo Siji ("Allen" Ai Lun) is technically a fugitive in hiding, although he turns out to be a better spiritual leader than he ever was a crook, and isn't pleased when tomb-raider uncle Luo Yin (Zhang Qi) and two not-so-bright nephews show up looking for the tomb of legendary pirate Chen Yisao, more so when their psychopathic escaped convict cousin Luo Hao (Zhou You) joins them. The tomb, it turns out, is under the police station, and when the cops bust a water pipe trying to dig for it, that allows the Luos to kidnap plumber Li Baibai (Bu Yu) and use that as a way to gain access.

This skips a lot, because there are more jokes and side characters and determination to get from one to the other in the funniest way possible. There's little done that just advances the plot without having a punchline of some sort attached to it, and the filmmakers' response to needing something to move to the next piece is throwing something new in, even if it doesn't necessarily follow from what comes before.

It's a good thing that they've got a fair amount of material, because the movie would really fall apart otherwise. The same impulse that lets them throw a bunch of goofy jokes into the corners (like the identifiers on the back of Armed Accounting's Kevlar vests) also leads to not fleshing much out at all or abandoning gags they've maybe tapped out even though maybe those guys should be around more (having one character be a psychopath who will murder no longer useful characters helps, I suppose). The script can border on the incoherent, and tends to have two sidekicks any place where it could probably make do with one. It would probably be nice to have a few more ladies mixed in as well - the only one of any note is Dahai's daughter Xioahe, with Yang Chenxi funny enough in the role that one might spend a lot of the film's middle wondering where Xiaohe is during all this.

But there's a lot of good slapstick, and those skills translate into an action finale that is funny and absurd but which could also be dropped into a more serious action movie without a whole lot of damage. That's in large part due to Eddie Peng, who has done a fair amount of action but here gives his super-cop in exile this sort of comically puffed-up masculinity that's had its rougher edges shaved off so he can be larger than life but not a buffoon or playing as mean. He's countered by Zhou You's Luo Hao, who plays like the dumb killer in a Coen Brothers movie, too stupid and casual with his violence to really feel like an antagonist rather than an agent of chaos, which keeps the movie from landing in too-grim territory.

Busted Water Pipes is goofy as heck, and I bet it would be fun to see in a packed theater. Unfortunately, its North American release comes close enough on the heels of its Chinese one and on a week crowded enough that it's mostly playing awkward times and you get pockets of the room laughing rather than a roar. Maybe it hasn't quite done well enough in its home territory for good word of mouth to get to the diaspora, but it's a good enough time to have broad appeal.


Chum Chun Gei (Back to the Past)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2026 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it and the original series

It's oddly reassuring to me when I see that the things people bemoan about American pop culture are not exclusively our problems. For example, A Step Into the Past was a hit show on Hong Kong's TVB network a generation ago, and has had both a reboot (in 2018) and this theatrical sequel 24 years later. American companies aren't the only ones who mine decades-old IP like this, even when name recognition is the most the new project has going for it!

That series posits that in 1999, Hong Siu Lung (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) traveled back in time 2000 years to witness the coronation of the emperor who would unite China's seven warring kingdoms, only to find the man dead, and wound up training Chiu Poon (Raymond Lam Fung) to impersonate him lest history change. 25 years later, he's on the verge of accompanying it while Hong attempts to keep a low profile with wives Wu Ting-Fong (Jessica Hester Hsuan) & Kam Ching (Sonija Kwok Sin-Nae) and son Bowie (Kevin Chu Kam-Yin), ready to flee if the Emperor decides his "Grand Tutor" is now a liability. Along a parallel track in 2025, the man who was originally supposed to go back in time but took the fall for Hong's disappearance, Ken (Michael Miu Kiu-Wai), has just been released in prison and is looking for payback, forcing the scientists to send him, daughter Galie (Fay Bai Baihe) and a number of mercenaries back, where he intends to alter history by using holographic technology to replace the Emperor.

To what end? Cool special effects, basically; although there's lip service paid to Ken wanting to prove history can be changed and the mercenaries intending to loot the palace of lost treasures, it's hard to really grasp what his endgame is. He gets to bring back a lot of futuristic technology, though - a timeline where they built a time machine in 1999 is apparently one where phones are a combination of transparent plastic and holographic projection, a combination motorbike and hoverboard can shrink to something that fits in one's pocket in abject defiance of the law of conservation of mass, and armor that can repel even its time's automatic weapons, let alone the sharp sticks in play here. It's slick enough, though, although a little blandly black-and-silver in its design (producer/star/production mogul Koo's previous sci-fi film, Warriors of the Future, seems to have had the same look from the stills I've seen), but the mashup of futuristic and historical is kind of fun, more often than not.

The original series is on Tubi (or it isn't, apparently leaving at the end of January), so maybe I'll watch a bit to see if it makes this film better at some point. The movie's not bad, exactly, but doesn't really have a reason to be. It's set too early to pick up on the show's implied tease of Hong's son being destined to depose Chiu, there's no real time travel shenanigans in terms of paradoxes effect preceding cause, and on top of Ken not seeming to have a goal, all that material takes time away from what could be an interesting story about how Chiu has become a tyrant and the responsibility Hong bears for that. There are possibilities all over the place - is Hong shaping his son differently than he did Chiu, are there parallels in Bowie's and Galis' relationships to their fathers, is it wiser to maintain the steady status quo or to try to forge a better world? - but nothing winds up emerging as a theme, and the filmmakers never really find anything to do with the decent hook of Ken plotting to do what Hong did out of necessity. Stuff happens, but it's more a series of events than a story where anything really hits if you don't have previous attachment.

It's not entirely difficult to see what the film appears to be a success in both Hong Kong and the mainland (and filling seats in Boston when given a chance): Koo is good in a role that lets him do a bit of everything, and has put a lot of resources into it, with his "One Cool X" companies all over the credits. The returning cast is all pretty solid, enough that one can understand why they'd all be around even if there's not really enough for them to do, and newcomers like Bai Baihe and Kevin Chu carry their parts well. Action director Sammo Hung can still choreograph a pretty darn good fight, especially when it's not all visual effects. It feels like a blockbuster that does a fair job of satisfying long-time fans without leaving the next generation behind.

Maybe it works if you love the show, since it doesn't entirely fail for those of us who didn't know it existed before the movie started. Even not knowing much about the show, though, this seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, something that looks good on a rights-holder's balance sheet but no strong story of its own.

The Fire Raven

Any word on what the big Lunar New Year movies are this year? There was actually a Chinese-language preview attached to this - something about crime being so rare in a certain town that the police station is targeted for elimination, so the cops start committing small crimes to save their jobs - but the bit with the title went by very fast. The holiday comes relatively late this year and there haven't been a whole lot of Chinese releases reaching Boston recently (it wasn't that long ago that something would grab a screen the same day as a new Star Wars movie a week before Christmas!), so it's been a really quiet where Chinese films are concerned lately. Resurrection has been the most prominent Chinese film in America, and that's from the art-house channel rather than the mainstream one.

The Fire Raven seems to be the biggest New Year's Eve movie in China this year, although Western movies are unusually competitive in that market right now, as Zootopia 2 is a juggernaut and Avatar 3 a pretty big deal. It's playing kind of lousy slots at Boston Common, either very early or very late in the day, and on top of that, after I reserved my seat, the AMC app was kind of flaky about showing the ticket: It would show as a slot taken on in the A-List section, but wouldn't be in my tickets. I had to bring up the email I got sent, which was strange.

Worth catching if that fits your schedule and you like weird action/mystery things, though.


Ni Sha (The Fire Raven aka Hidden Kill)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 January 2026 in AMC Boston Common #17 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Not having seen a trailer - a common occurrence with Chinese movies, which will often show up in America without a whole lot of English-language promotion - and having associated writer/director Sam Quah Boon-Lip more closely with another series of crime movies than he maybe should be, I was expecting something pretty different: One of those grim movies set in Thailand or a Thailand-like places but where everyone is ethnically Chinese and speaking Mandarin which allows for more grisly crimes and corrupt cops than something set in China. Instead, it plays like something adapted from a larger-than-life manga, a big screwy adventure that careens out of control at times.

(It's fair to be confused, though - his film Wu Sha, or Sheep Without a Shepherd in English, spawned Wu Sha 2 and Wu Sha 3, which are similar premises and also star Yang Xiao, but are separate stories, while Quah has also directed two films named "Mo Sha", the latter arriving in America as "A Place Called Silence", and this is "Ni Sha" in Mandarin, though, for all I know, these are all different symbols.)

It takes place in the fictitious "Doma City" and what appears to be the near future, just before the local holiday of "Crowmoot" and a local election, which will be influenced by the Air and Ventilation Taxes being levied on the literal Undercity. The crow the camera follows to start the film leads the audience to the murder of Talaura (Huang Yi), a shady talent agent, by someone wearing a crow mask. Lead detective Fang Zhengnan (Janine Chang Chun-Ning) recognizes the sketchbook left at the scene as one drawn by her foster brother Tianyang (Peng Yuchang) when he witnessed a murder on a train 15 years ago while he and Zhengnan hid from conductors. To Zhengnan's partner Edward (Wang Xun), that makes Tianyang the prime suspect, but Tianyang's "eagle eye" for detail finds discrepancies, leading them to believe that someone is trying to avenge that murder, with fight promoter Shang Zhan (Alan Aruna) and gangster Tongcai (Hai Yitian) likely next on the hit list.

Tianyang also has a prosthetic leg that can do some pretty neat tricks, and the attempt on Shang's life is larger-than-life in an almost slapstick way that may, admittedly, have been more delightful considering that I was expecting a far more dour movie. Quan often seems like he's got a notecard file filled with elevated action world-building details that he's stitching together because this is not the sort of thing he's known for and he might not get another chance, and sometimes it can be a lot of fun - the way one of Talaura's accomplices gets taken out is hilarious cartoon violence - but sometimes it can just be a lot: The 15 years earlier segments have 15 years earlier segments of their own, and a lot of revelations tend to feel kind of random, in that you see that, sure, this character has been around and could slot into that position, but Quan's script usually has to flash back to even make you notice them rather than make one immediately realize that this fits. Chekhov's bionic leg sits on the mantel for what seems like a good long while.

It's still kind of fun, in large part because Chang Chun-Ning and Peng Yuchang are allowed to hit the ground running, with Quan presenting this pair as folks who have apparently solved other cases together, with what feels like a natural pre-existing vibe and upbeat, energetic attitudes despite the fact that the story shovels tragic backstories and an environment that can grind one down. They're charismatic problem-solvers who work well together, with enough folks like Wang Xun, Xu Jiao, Huang Xiaoming, Hai Yitian providing color as supporting characters to offset a couple guys in important spots who can be kind of bland.

The visuals and action are a good time as well. The design of this world tends toward the colorful and poppy rather than just sleek black or run-down brown, and there's a bit of willingness to push the effects past seamless if it will look cool. Chang Chung-Ning and the stunt team acquit themselves well enough when asked to get into a fight, although sometimes the action feels like a few more takes and resources might have made it better; for example, there's a point in a car chase when barrelling through tunnels full of construction has gotten two vehicles tangled in the same plastic mesh and the audience has barely had time to wonder what they're going to do with this before it's over. There's also a pretty decent train-based climax which feels like coming full circle on top of how setting an action sequence on a train makes it 23% better most of the time.

There's also an extended, impressively violent epilogue that, for as good as its best bits of mayhem are, tends to underline how Quan is seemingly trying to cram a lot of bits into one movie, and he also seems to have pushed the Chinese censors about as far as they're willing to go in terms of a killer not getting properly punished, even in sort-of-Malaysia rather than the mainland to the point where one might remember the intertitles tut-tutting about vigilantism as much as anything else. This isn't exactly surprising - Sheep without a Shepherd worked in large part because it leaned into how a viewer wanted folks to get away with something - and I hope he's got more chances to do fun adventure as opposed to gloomy crime, whether that's making this into the series it seemingly should be or not.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 03: Prodigal Sons and Lau Kar-Leung x3 (+1)

Crap, there's an eight-month gap in here. How does that even happen? I really do want to get through this wall, but, nope, just adding to it while doing other stuff.

Way back in January, Dale rolled a 9 getting her to The Prodigal Son, one of Yuen Biao's most popular movies from the 1980s.

A couple days later, Centipede would roll a 4, which got him to Arrow's Lau Kar-Leung box set, but it would be March before I started in on it with Challenge of the Masters, then Executioners from Shaolin in April, Heroes of the East in September, and Dirty Ho in October. Which is crazy, even though there are three entire film festivals in there covering a whole month and attempts to catch up writing which led to me not hitting the shelf. Obviously, I have a problem with making movie-watching projects into writing projects .

So, how did all this time treat the players?

Baai ga jai (The Prodigal Son)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

This is kind of a weird one, especially the first time through, as the filmmakers make some abrupt transitions and tone shifts, like they've got a good outline that doesn't always work in detail, but you can see the ambition there. A second time through, it works a bit better, especially after watching some of the Shaw Brothers films this evolved from. The comedy's goofier, but the greater themes are closer to the surface.

The man of the title is Leung Chang (Yuen Biao), the son of a wealthy merchant whose father pays martial artists to lose to him in street brawls, lest he get injured; he doesn't find out he's really bad at kung fu until friends ask him to take on Leung Yee-Tai (Lam Ching-Ying), an opera singer in female roles who is actually a master. Chang finagles his way into the troupe to attempt to learn from him, but winds up revealing Tai to Ngai Fei (Frankie Chan Fan-Kei), another enthusiast looking for a fight, eventually requiring a retreat to heal and train with Tai old friend and rival Wong Wa-po (Sammo Hung Kam=Bo).

I spent a bit of time looking up what the "home video cut" on this disc was (apparently, the same thing except with actor credits up front rather than as they appear), which was how I learned that it was apparently a prequel to Warriors Two; I suspect may explain the big weird jump in the middle where Leung and Ngai flee the circus and wind up at the home of Wong Wah-bo without much in-film work to connect them at all. I thought it was cut for time, but apparently it just wouldn't have been necessary for the Hong Kong audience. It's an odd and unusual shift - the film had just finished ramping up from mostly-comic to deadly-serious, and then it's getting slapstick and goofy again.

Sammo Hung and company do an impressive job of balancing whimsy and cruel violence here, though, better than should be possible. It's an especially nice showcase for Yuen Biao, who gets to play comic and earnest to start and shift his fighting to match. Biao never became quite so famous in the West as schoolmates Jackie Chan and Sammo, but his physicality here is impressive - he doesn't pratfall as the inexperienced student who doesn't really know kung fu, but he's a bit sloppy, and one can see him tightening that up as the film proceeds to its final confrontation. The last act nicely underlines the parallels between Chang and Ngai, both scions of rich families whose patriarchs take pains to insulate them from defeat. There's maybe not a particular lesson in this, but it's something that gives a little extra heft to a situation where both the comedy and violence could be hollow.

Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong (Challenge of the Masters)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Every once in a while, I wonder what Wong Fei-Hung's defendants think of his status as a folk hero, his life being rewritten to fit a story's needs, perhaps because you can't tell a story in this era without referring to him. He's such a legend that every martial arts movie in the mid-1800s must be a Wong Fei-Hung movie, even if they're not really Wong Fei-Hung movies.

In this one, Wong Fei-Hung (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) is presented as a teenager who loves martial arts despite his father's refusal to teach him, especially the annual "Pau Battle", an annual free-for-all where the various schools compete to collect tokens launched from fireworks. But there's more going on, as Yuan Ching (Lau Kar-Leung), who studied under the same master as Fei-Hung's father Kay-Ying (Chiang Yang), Lu Ah Tsai (Che Kuan-Tai), has arrived in pursuit of a fugitive (Lau Kar-Leung) who has embedded himself in a rival school. He sees Fei-Hung's natural aptitude, but may not be prepared for how desperate and deadly his quarry is.

At its best, Challenge of the Masters contemplates the question of what martial arts is for and the journey to understanding it; Gordon Liu plays Won Fei-Hung as a shallow kid who only sees the respect and action, and his attempts to force himself into the Pau battles without the requisite training are immature and dangerous, though maybe not arrogantly so, but is later forged into a righteous weapon of justice and vengeance. If Liu is a bit stiffer at this point, it's fine; it plays like he's mastered his rage, an exclamation point to how his performance evolves over the long stretch of training.

Director Lau Kar-Leung's action is on point throughout; there's an edge to the violence, with the way that the Pau battles get out of control a warning about how dangerous undisciplined martial arts can be, and he imbues his villain with a nastiness that is both confident and cowardly. It's what makes the final duel between him and Liu's Wong Fei-Hung so satisfying; it's a fast-paced fight where we've see that both can do damage, but we can see the earnest purpose to what Wong has become. Lau's He Fu is too skilled to be afraid, but his vibe is different.

The story is thin as heck; the Pau contest feels a bit like stuffing, a great spectacle tied to the more substantive story, but it reinforces things well enough. Like a lot of Lau's output (and that of writer I Kuang), it's a movie built to show the action with other stuff going on, but it runs smoothly in doing so.


Hong Xi Guan (Executioners from Shaolin)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 19 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

I'm not sure exactly how this fits in with Chang Cheh's Shaw Brothers Extended Shaolin Temple Universe, though it doesn't really matter that much, other than how one can't necessarily help but think of the timeline and history throughout.

It picks up as the Temple burns, and Pai Mei (Lo Lieh) sends the governor's forces to ideally capture the fleeing monks, hoping they can be tortured into revealing the locations of others. After Tong Qianjin (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) buys them some time to escape, Hong Xiguan (Chen Kuan-Tai) and his friend Xiaohu (Cheng Kang-Yeh) are among those taking refuge on the red boats, disguised as opera troupes. In one village, street performer Fang Yung Chun ("Lily" Li Li-Li) objects to their arrogance, but soon she and Hong are spending all their time together. But while they travel and perform, Pai Mei is consolidating his power, and it's not long after the couple marry that soldiers mount an attack on the red boats, sending them further into hiding.

Executioners has the feel of something that is based around history and/or legends and has been sort of messily cobbled together and then pushed to be irreverent, and I sometimes wonder if the legends retold in these martial-arts epics need an environment where both they and the creators can breathe. It's one thing to say someone trains for years in anticipation of a decisive fight in a serialized novel, but another when two or ten years occur between shots but only one character is being recast and the visual changes are too minor to really feel like time has passed. Often, "he trained for years" is used as a shorthand for it being very important but the other impact isn't felt on screen. Warrior monks seemingly only get more powerful and skilled, as opposed to a trade-off between one's technique improving but the body starting to turn.

So against this background, the romance between Xiguan and Yung-Chun is just kind of there, necessary but not passionate, the "comedy" is mostly abrasive, and the preparations for/fights against Pai Mei tend to be about hitting specific weak spots rather than strategy: The finale could be about the value of knowing multiple styles versus attempting to hone one to perfection, but that's mostly mentioned in passing. The big fights are, of course, good stuff, even if Pai Mei's signature move is apparently to let people kick him in the nuts so that he can grasp their foot with his groin and drag them around. The fights are good, of course, although the early ones with their desperation top the later ones with their silly rules


Zhong hua zhang fu (Heroes of the East)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 September2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

This and the other Lau Kar-Leung movie on the second disc of the box set are kung fu comedies that feel like they were completely dispensing with any pretense that the kung fu was just part of these movies' appeal or a way of telling the story. Here are guys who know how to fight, this story says, some wacky situations, and then let's go.

In this case, the wacky situation has Ho Tao (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) objecting to an arranged marriage with a childhood friend - the daughter of one of his father's Japanese business associates - until he sees that Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno) is gorgeous. It turns out she shares his interest in martial arts, though her studies have naturally tended toward Japanese forms, and she quickly moves to monopolize the estate's training grounds. Eventually, Yumiko returns to Japan, where she reacquaints herself with old friend (and ninjutsu expert) Takeno (Yasuaki Kurata), who brings an entire brace of Japanese martial artists to challenge Tao.

The back half especially is one duel after another, more or less completely arbitrary, without much in the way of dramatic stakes once one sees that Tao and Yumiko have more or less put their issues behind them. But, hey, it works; the movie's a ton of fun. I wish that I knew a bit more about Hong Kong/Japan relations in the late 1970s, because in some ways this movie has a weird tension underneath: The arranged marriage eventually becomes reasonably warm, but while Ho Tao is initially described as just being pretty good at martial arts, he defeats a whole bunch of masters of various Japanese disciplines. Lots of movies and other bits of pop culture will try and walk a line where one is earnestly interested in and admiring of a foreign culture but with the unspoken assumption that one's own is better, although, hey, some of these folks are old enough to be WWII vets (and I've seen a lot of recent Chinese movies very focused on Japan as a sadistic occupying army), and one can't help but wonder what the thinking is here.

The long string of duels kind of overwhelms anything going on between Tao and Kumiko, which is a bit of a shame; one can see how the couple can be fun once they're a bit less at odds, and Cheng Kang-Yeh is kind of obnoxious fun as the servant who enjoys stirring the pot. The various Japanese martial-arts masters are kind of one-note aside from Yasuaki Kurata's Takeno, but they're generally entertaining notes. I'm a bit surprised that Yuka Mizuno seems to have had quite a short career - only two other films after this one - and while she's sort of rough as an actress, one can see potential enough to make one wonder what her story is.

Heroes of the East could be a really fun kung fu romantic comedy, but it's just focused on the fights. It's a very entertaining fight movie, and that's enough.


Lan tou He (Dirty Ho)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Treating this as a bonus, since I have seen the film before, though it's been nearly 20 years since it played on film at Fantasia. I reviewed it at the time, although, yikes, is my writing and general familiarity with Asian genre film rough. Can't claim to be too much of a kid, either, at 32.

Ah, well. It was still a real kick to revisit . For all that "Dirty Ho" probably didn't have the same meaning at the time, it's full of winking innuendo to start, and Gordon Liu Chia-Hui is a real delight as the jewel merchant who is eventually revealed as more, cool and confident but eventually revealing the burden of his position - too decent, really, to want to be king, which ultimately makes him the only acceptable choice. He's a fun pairing with Wong Yu's title character - it's not quite a buddy movie, as it winds up too much a master-student situation - but Wong really finds a nice comic groove as someone half scammer, half put-upon, and manages to keep it even as the stakes get higher.

Good fun.


Not counting Dirty Ho because it's a re-watch, that gets both our players up to six movies, and nearly tied:

Dale Evans: 17 ¾ stars
Centipede: 17 ½ stars

Now, let's hope the next rolls don't get bogged down!

A Writer's Odyssey 2

Kind of idly wondering if this will pick up more showtimes during the week, since the Taylor Swift thing basically ate theaters alive this weekend, taking up a crazy number of showtimes and seemingly making scheduling hard. It wasn't exactly a packed house, although it seems to be doing a bit better in China than the movie opening here next weekend, though it's getting stomped by the third movie in Chen Kaige's The Volunteers trilogy during its National Day opening. It's day-and-date, which suggests the first one did okay here.

It's kind of a weird sequel, because it seems like it abandons a lot of the lore of the first one. It's been four years, but it's odd looking at that movie's review and going "oh yeah!" at a bunch of things that were really pushed back or rearranged for this one. If nothing else, it's kind of an interesting way to do a sequel, one you see more often in books than movies, but also more than a bit strange.


Ci Sha Xiao shuo jia 2 (A Writer's Odyssey 2)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 October 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (eventually) or the first movie (Prime link), or buy the first on disc at Amazon

There's a moment in A Writer's Odyssey 2 where one character reminds another that "remember, they sent me to kill you" and, because I didn't revisit the original before watching this, I was like, right, there was a "they" last time! What happened to them? The funny thing is, it wasn't until re-reading my previous entry before starting this one that I realized that the feeling that the filmmakers (or the original novel The Assassination of the Author) are making things up as they go along doubles once you try to look at the series as a whole.

As the film starts, it's been a few years since Lu Kongwen (Dong Zijian) completed his serialized novel Godslayer by having his author-stand-in character slay the demonic Redmane. Somehow, in the aftermath, a charlatan/hacker going by Cicada (Chang Yuan) took control of Lu's account and is regarded as the true author of Godslayer, and has announced a sequel - but, it turns out, writing is hard, so he wants to work with Lu on it. Lu, meanwhile, is living with Guang Ning (Lei Jiayin), the would-be assassin who has reunited with his daughter Tangerine (Wang Shengdi), running a small restaurant. Lu's mind has been returning to that world of late, where Redmane has resurrected in human form (Deng Chao), and after encountering Lu Kongwen in what Lu thought was just a dream, convinces his world's Kongwen, Tangerine, and Tong Hu (also Lei Jiayin) to join him on a quest to kill the cruel God who apparently is casually writing the deaths of hundreds to highlight the cruelty of the three warlords who are fighting for control - which is to say, the real world's Lu Kongwen.

So, is Li Mu alive again, or still (since one of the genuinely weird things about the ending of the first was that the audience never knew whether the real-world CEO connected to Redmane died when he did)? No idea! There may be one blink-and-miss-it mention of Aladdin Group in the entire movie. Does Guang Ning still have an amazing ability to throw rocks for impossible results akin to Daredevil foe Bullseye? Never mentioned! What is Cicada's whole deal? Not sure, the guy sort of exits without fanfare midway through the movie and doesn't really figure into the story after that, since he doesn't have a Godslayer-world doppelganger - although, for all I know, this sort of online identity theft may be a thing that happens relatively often in China and not a big deal, but it sure seems like he's just a random plot device to knock Lu Kongwen back to dire straits but get him involved again. It's kind of sloppy writing, and even more so when you try to connect to what came before.

That said, it mostly works well enough if one comes in knowing it's a second part but not particularly worried about that. The situation lu Kongwen is in kind of seems iffy, but Dong Zijian gives a surprisingly compelling performance as a man who has briefly tasted success for doing something he loves but has stewed over how it's been taken away from him for the past few years, and see that seep into his cheerful, idealistic avatar. Deng Chao is playing to the balconies as Redname, but nevertheless manages the thing where you can see the heroes going along with him despite his obviously being evil. The crossover between the real world and the fantasy world tends to draw a grin, even when it's being very silly.

Plus, the fantasy world stuff is fairly fun. Once again, it occurs to me after the movie that Lu Kongwen is maybe meant to be the sort of fantasy writer who can really conjure up a nifty image but is kind of terrible at structure, and that's why so much of the stuff in the fantasy world seems kind of slapdash and under-explored, but also quite cool: I love the dragon airships and hope the promised/threatened third movie gives us a whole sequence built around them (as in the first, they are probably a heck of a thing to see in Imax 3D), Redmane can eat people with his hair, and it usually comes at the end of a niftily-staged duel. Returning director Lu Yang is back on the sharp blacks-and-whites aesthetic, but there's room for whimsy in his grimdark world, and the action is pretty good, feeling a bit weightier than other super-powered, CGI-heavy millieus.

Ultimately, though, the story seems kind of messy, and for a movie where the filmmakers are very explicitly saying to note the connections between the fantasy world and the real world, it doesn't seem to be about much in particular. Sure, there are metaphors all over the place - the film very helpfully underlines them - but when it comes right down to it, just what is this writer's odyssey and how is it affecting him? This movie doesn't necessarily have to be about something extraordinarily profound, but the way it bops around from playing one game to another tends to highlight that it's not quite as clever as it wants to present itself as.

Indeed, the mid-credit sequence is a bunch of "hey, this thing that was kind of fun earlier on doesn't really make any sense", hinting at something else that will show up in a part 3 (not sure what, as it involved some unsubtitled text). It's probably just enjoyable enough for me to get a ticket to that threequel when it arrives, although there's a real risk of diminishing returns.

Asian Blockbusters: War 2 and Dead to Rights

Anyone know a good, English-friendly site for Indian box office? It would probably be a tricky sort of thing, since India has at least three or four movie industries based on language and region and international releases maybe account for more than they do in China, but I do get kind of curious about how (a)typical what hangs around Cambridge is compared to what's popular where it comes from.

I can look up how Dead to Rights did readily enough (although the site for Chinese box office has gotten slow!), although it does make me wonder how manipulated audiences and those numbers are; it's way ahead of other summer releases but it's as far from a fun movie as you'll see, though it may be in the "government/orgranizations heartily recommends this patriotic epic and maybe organizes outings or buys out theaters so tickets are free" category. But that's kind of paranoia about China as much as anything, I suppose, me kind of applying something I've heard about to the data because it explains the popularity of a thing I'm sort of lukewarm on.

At any rate, both of these did well enough to get a second week in and around Boston, and you could certainly do worse if you want to see a big movie during the August doldrums.


War 2

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2025 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Where to stream the first to catch up (Prime Video link), or order the Indian DVD at Amazon

Even when the interval is completely edited out of an Indian movie for US release - you don't even see the word appear on screen before a fade-out/fade-in these days - there's often no missing how much these movies are built around the cliffhanger. That can be a lot of fun when it's a fun twist that makes it feel like you're getting a movie and its clever sequel at the same time, although for War 2, it's more a case of one half being stronger as it tries to be that, leaving enough action to be fun but not quite great.

It opens with the first film's hero, Kabir Dhaliwal (Hrithik Roshan) singlehandedly taking out an entire yakuza family in Japan, though he's no longer working for Indian intelligence but as a freelance assassin. It's actually kind of both - Colonel Sunil Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) has recruited him to go deep undercover in the hopes of his being recruited by the Kali cartel, a loose confederation of criminal and terrorist organizations surrounding India, with Indian businessman Gautam Gulati (K.C. Shankar) looking to use the organization to secretly control the country. He succeeds, but at terrible cost, leading Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), the new head of JOCR, to assemble a task force including Luthra's daughter Kavya (Kiara Advani), a hero in the air force, and top special-ops agent Vikram (N.T. Rama Rao Jr. aka "NTR") to track him down, even as Kali plans an operation that could plunge the whole region into chaos.

I do believe that I outright cackled at the increasingly deranged action of the first half just enough to forgive a pretty leaden second half. The opening segment is kind of a mess - it's full of characters who are described as very important but vanish right after the action sequence they are in is done, for instance - but the sheer glee the filmmakers show in immediately escalating after the last sequence and portraying its super-agents as downright superheroic keeps the energy up even as the story starts to emerge. The second part, meanwhile, starts with a flashback that must run a full half hour desperately trying to create a tragic shared backstory for Kabir and Vikram, and later serves up another that is such an obligatory romantic number that it undercuts its intention by being nowhere near as passionate and entertaning as the song featuring Kabir & Vikram. You could probably cut a whole ton of that out, just focusing on the threat to the country, and have a good action movie without the attempts to make the mission personal bogging things down.

As such, it's a messy movie in the opposite way of the first War, which was ridiculous but in audacious ways in how it was always trying to top the last twist. That one was darn near incoherent by the end, but rose to a crescendo. This feels like the sort of movie where they've pre-vizzed the action scenes before the script was done and then struggled to connect them. Maybe that's why it seemed so front-loaded - that's where the good, nutty action fit story-wise, leaving relatively drab material for the finale.

Still, the good action is a lot of fun, betraying only a passing concern for actual physics, but kinetic and leaning into being larger than life. The bit with the wrecking ball, for instance, has a delightfully hilarious cartoon logic, and it's maybe only the second-most ridiculous thing in that set piece; there's also a quality runaway train sequence (although I do seem to recall something similar in one of the Tiger movies). There are bits where the characters supposedly being secret agents working in the shadows makes the bits of Bollywood musical that still cling to these movies even funnier, because they're really riding the line between "there's a song playing and everyone is stopping to dance" at times.

I still kind of dig Roshan in this role, especially when he gets to do grizzled cockiness rather than having to flail at melodrama, especially in contrast to NRT's battering ram, which is very fun in this context even if I might quickly grow impatient with this character as a lead should the filmmakers fork him off into another corner of the YRF Spy Universe. I kind of wish Kiara Advani had more to do even after they've worked to give her a shared backstory; she's kind of hanging around until they need a pilot. Anil Kapoor's Vikrant Kaul, meanwhile, is one eyepatch away from being Indian Nick Fury, which amused me greatly.

War 2 is a very silly movie, and it's at its best when that's what it's going for instead of grasping for tragedy and emotion.


Nanjing Zhao Xiang Guan (Dead to Rights)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Dead to Rights is one of those movies that is a huge hit in China - $380M+ box office during a summer where few have reached half that - in a way that makes one pause. It's impressively mounted and fairly well made, and between the description and English-language title it has been given, it sounds like a nifty thriller . In actuality, it is a dour film about the horrors visited upon the audience's great-grandparents, and is that really what folks want to see more than anything else when they go to the movies right now, or has attendance been boosted/inflated, as had been known to happen with these patriotic historical films?

In this case, it begins as Nanjing falls to Japan in 1937, and postman Su Liuchang (Liu Haoran) is attempting to flee, as the Japanese are slaughtering them, as their uniforms and mailbags look military enough to their eyes. He flees into a photo studio, only to quickly be confronted by Wang Guanghai (Wang Chan-Jun), who is working as a translator to earn exit passes for himself, his wife, and his son, in this case, for army photographer Hideo Ito (Daichi Harashima), who can shoot but doesn't know how to develop film. Neither does Su, but the actual proprietor Jin Chengzong (Xiao Wang) is hiding under the floorboards with his wife and daughter Wanyi (Yang Enyou). Jin will teach Su (going by the alias A-Tong) the craft if he hides them, but it gets harder - looking to protect his mistress, actress Lin Yuxiu (Gao Ye), Guanghai install her in the photoshop as A-Tong's wife, and she has smuggled wounded soldier Song Cunyi (Zhou You) in via her luggage. It's a lot to keep hidden, and the fact that the photos Ito brings them to develop often contain atrocities, and are they any less complicit than Guanghai for developing them?

There's some irony to wondering if people really want to see this, as one can see; the film is, at times, about its characters being very torn between the feeling that developing photographs of what would later be called The Rape of Nanjing makes them collaborators in these horrors and ultimately realizing that this might be the only way of exposing these atrocities. It's strong medicine, but the generation that experienced this first-hand is almost completely gone, and if you want to reinforce its memory, you've got to make something scarring but compelling enough that people want to see it. A Chinese Schindler's List of sorts, where the horrors are just short of overwhelming, but there's just enough heroism underneath to prevent a message that fighting evil is ultimately pointless.

Is this that movie? I'm not sure. Writer/director Shen Ao has seen the power of the central dilemma but not necessarily made it what drives the movie. The characters talk about it on occasion, but it doesn't really become what they're doing on screen until it's time to reveal how something was accomplished at the end, by which time they've kept the thriller elements off the screen so much that it's barely even partially the sort of movie where one is looking for how the sleight of hand is pulled off. It's almost entirely about how the people of Nanjing have been sadistically murdered by the Japanese by that point, whether they are in the midst of heroics, actively or passively collaborating, or just being in the wrong place at that point in history. It's not a story happening against that background; the background is the story, and the heroes must be utterly steadfast while the corruption of those who are less can't quite become interesting enough to take the center.

Shen does it well enough, as filmmakers who are not particularly subtle or subversive go. Dead to Rights one of those war movies that is relentlessly gray and desaturated, right up until the moment a Japanese soldier wishes they had color film to capture the gore and a river soon runs red with blood for some of the only real color in the film. He puts together a few good scenes and does okay pushing how terrible things can be without getting walkouts (I imagine his crew is well-practiced at staging military action with clearly-depicted violence and martyrdom from the sheer number of war films China produces). He's good with his cast, and they contribute performances that wouldn't be out of place in a movie intending to more thoroughly explore various parts of its story: Liu Haoran is an amiable lead and has enough chemistry with Gao Ye's Lin Yuxiu that you could probably build a good movie around the pair getting to know each other rather than skipping to the highlights; Wang Chuan-jun gives Guanghai enough sweaty desperation to be interesting in a movie that isn't going to moderate its contempt for traitors even while occasionally giving lip service to where the line is. Daichi Harashimo does very nice work showing Ito mature into something more willingly monstrous.

For better or worse, Shen doesn't appear to be a guy who tries to get cute or ironic trying to find nuance or poke at the party line, which works better here than in previous film, No More Bets (that one abandoned flawed but interesting protagonists for an extended lecture). Still, he can occasionally go above and beyond, as when the characters briefly stop to solemnly say slogans or when the film ends on the most extreme "cringe does not pay and justice was done" epilogue a film can have. It's not exactly wrong, but the film is not built in a way to allow its heroes to feel any regret or discomfort for what they had to do in awful circumstances, and one can see that.

Ultimately, Dead to Rights is two hours of solemn misery and while I probably wouldn't have this story be anything else, I might like it to be more.