Zero Sum Filmmaking
It’s true. Everything really is a Trump allegory now.
Detective Chinatown 1900
Directors: Chen Sicheng, Dai Mo • Writer: Chen Sicheng
Starring: Wang Baoqiang, Liu Haoran, Chow Yun-fat, Bai Ke, Steven Zhang, Yue Yunpeng, John Cusack
China • 2hrs 16mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 13 • IIB
Grade: C
It’s 1900 in the burgeoning metropolis that will one day birth algorithms that rule us all, San Francisco (played by a soundstage), and a white woman and a Native American man are found brutally murdered in an alley. The main suspect is quickly identified as Bai Zhenbang (Steven Zhang Xincheng), dubbed the Chinese Jack The Ripper and held up as a valid reason to outlaw Chinatowns across the States and implement a permanent version of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Arriving on the scene is amateur detective Qin Fu (Liu Haoran), who gets roped into solving the case by Zhenbang’s powerful self-made businessman father Bai Xuanling (Chow Yun-fat), along with Gui (Wang Baoqiang), a Chinese dude who was orphaned as a child and raised by a Native American tribe; his adoptive father is the dead Native man. And that, people, is just the foundation of the overstuffed story.
Where do you start with all that is very, very wrong with Detective Chinatown 1900 | 唐探1900? Is it the redface, and if so should anyone be surprised it slipped into the film? Maybe it’s the shamelessness of the messaging this time around? Is it the low volume of jokes in the fourth in director Chen Sicheng’s massively popular Detective Chinatown series? Or the fact that the jokes that are here clang – loudly – with the deadly serious narrative context? Nothing screams laff riot like codified racism. Maybe it’s knowing this was a giant hit that’s grossed nearly US$400 million in China?
Chen reunites with Wang and Liu for a prequel that sticks the earlier films’ Tang Ren and Qin Feng in the past (though it never suggests Gui and Qin Fu are distant ancestors) and throws in some leftover John Cusack (who co-starred in Decoded) to overact and cash a cheque for good measure. In typical Detective Chinatown fashion there are plots on subplots on C stories on side plots to fatten the run time and exhaust viewers. Because the Exclusion Act isn’t enough to fire up audiences (and it should as yet another particularly ugly chapter in American history) 1900’s B story pivots on revolutionary Zheng Shiliang (Bai Ke, or White-K), a friend of Zhenbang’s who’s being pursued by the Empress Dowager’s agent Fei Yanggu (Yue Yunpeng, and his out-of-step bureaucrat is a highlight), all the way from Beijing. Moving on, Cusack plays Grant, the Evil White Guy running for public office on a hate platform, and who could easily be Donald Trump, in league with Irish gangs who have an uneasy peace with the Chinese. It’s all very Deadwood and if you can believe it, there’s even more, all of it ostensibly there to beef up Qin’s Sherlock Holmesian storyline and inject the movie with the slapsticky, madcap mystery audiences are likely expecting. The difference between this and the first three DC capers, however, is Chen’s decision to go all in on the politicking and getting lost in the mire along the way. Riddled with conflicting (but “correct”) messages and head-scratching logic, by the time the third act rolls around 1900 has dished out its fair share of tonal whiplash to go with some alarming credit-sequence posturing.
Ultimately Chen and new co-director Dai Mo (who directed some of the iQIYI spin-off) stray a long way off DC’s path into a half-assed examination of white power in America and its tendency towards erasure of anyone and everyone else from history. That’s a very real issue – and it’s the subject of any number of academic papers and non-fiction books by people from across the spectrum much more qualified than Chen, Dai or me to debate. But one thing for sure is that Wang’s Gui is really, really pushing its luck when it comes to having him run around in Native garb (Navajo? Wappo? Paiute? Same same, right?) but Yin Zheng (!) as a chief “hilariously” bargaining away his (also not-Native) daughter (!!) and some land (!!!) hurts my head. As does the volume at which everyone speaks their lines – generally 11 – and the performances that seem to toggle between flat (Bai, Zhang) to manic (Cusack and all the other wypipo). WTF, movie?
That said, Detective Chinatown 1900 is blessed with some excellent turn of the century costume design and a quaint, if sanitised, San Francisco set that gives the whole thing a sheen of fantasy. Thankfully Chow is on hand to effortlessly class up the joint, and he’s easily the best part of the film. Hot take, amirite? He’s truly commanding when he marches into City Hall to defend the OG Bay Area’s Chinese citizens and tell the legislators they’re total assholes. He looks great. He sounds great. He’s as cool as he’s ever been, so it’s a shame the rest of the film lets him down.