Andy Lau

  • Xia dao lian meng [The Adventurers] (2017)

    Xia dao lian meng [The Adventurers] (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2020) I must have missed the memo on Chinese cinephile Francophilia, because The Adventurers is the third recent Chinese film mostly set in France featuring international jewel thieves in vast French estates that I’ve seen in as many months. Whereas Armour of God 3 had Jackie Chan, this one has Andy Lau, and Jean Reno to provide local colour. (Amazingly enough, almost all of Reno’s lines are in English, which makes sense from an international marketing standpoint but still feels weird to me.) Director Stephen Fung is at his best when handing the action and suspense sequences, his camera moving smoothly throughout his shots. But while The Adventurers delivers the essential successfully, it doesn’t add much to the tried-and-true caper formula. It’s watchable enough without being memorable. A few pacing issues arise in-between the big action scenes… and since the action set-pieces are front-loaded, it makes the end of the film feel disappointing without a clear climax. Add to that the familiarity of just about every sequence (although I did like the bit inspired by Mission: Impossible) and The Adventurers can’t claim to be more than a mildly entertaining film for the crowds. But at least it succeeds at that.

  • Di Renjie: Tong tian di guo [Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame] (2010)

    Di Renjie: Tong tian di guo [Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2014) One of the best things about the globalization of mass entertainment is the opportunity to see Hollywood-style blockbuster epics coming from very different places. So that’s how we end up with Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame, a reinterpretation of a brilliant historical Sherlock Holmes-like investigator with the trapping of a modern action/adventure tent-pole event. In this case, we find ourselves in seventh-century China, as a massive Budha statue is about to be unveiled to commemorate the coronation of an empress. When sudden combustion strikes important people, it’s up to disgraced detective Dee to track the clues leading all the way to an attempted coup. This being a made-in-China-for-Chinese-audiences affair, Mystery of the Phantom Flame has a welcome flavor for Western audiences, but the structure of the film will be familiar enough to transcend all barriers: Detective Dee, played by Any Lau, is pleasingly brilliant, his back-story makes for a complex figure, and the action sequences don’t need any translation. Sure, the mysticism-tinged plot doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense at times. But Hark Tsui’s direction is slick and polished, and the film does have the heft of a big-budget spectacular. Having a look at it portends a future in which not all blockbusters will be American.