Law & Disorder
Zhang Yimou scion Zhang Mo channels Dick Wolf and some cheesy ’90s thrillers for a bit of fantasy-action.
Last Suspect
Director: Zhang Mo • Writers: Ding Rui, Hu Xiaoshuai, Jing Pangsan, Sun Lin, Sun Zeyu
Starring: Zhang Xiaofei, Lee Hong-chi, Kara Wai, Hong Junjia, Kent Tong, Boogie Wang, Wang Yixuan
China • 2hrs
Opens Hong Kong November 30 • IIB
Grade: C
There’s a suspicious trend emerging in Chinese cinema, one in which (increasingly) Macau masquerades as a ridiculously named, fictional Southeast Asian city, where Chinese writing isn’t out of place or confined to a “Chinatown” and Mandarin speakers are totally commonplace. These anonymous cities are, for all intents and purposes, Chinese cities, except for the rampant second and third languages beyond Chinese – one is always English, the other looks Malay or Indonesian, sometimes you get Thai – access to Google, and inordinate levels of crime. They’re legally independent of China, yet somehow the bad guys end up subject to Chinese law. Need examples? Box office hit Lost in the Stars for one, and the scaremongering thriller No More Bets, which compelled the Thai tourism authority to create a series of reassuring ads to win back Chinese travellers.
Go ahead and add to the list Last Suspect | 拯救嫌疑人, the third feature by Zhang Yimou’s offspring, Zhang Mo (Snipers). Last Suspect is completely bananas; a legal thriller with zero actual law to grasp onto for any kind of storytelling cohesion, absolutely no sense of place, and an entirely bizarre moral compass that makes dubious demands of the audience. And it puts Hollywood to shame on the Toronto-as-Chicago/Manhattan front. Having our heroic lawyer running all over what is clearly Senado Square and calling the city Kuapuar is hilarious. This films wants its cake and it wants to eat it, and I have so many questions.
Ga-gong!
First of all, no matter how competent, no lawyer has their trial activity breathlessly followed by the press the way Vicky Chen (Zhang Xiaofei, Hi, Mom) does – the latest superstar lawyer of Chinese cinema (Lost in the Stars had one too). We’re told she’s won 30 straight cases like it’s a home run streak, and as a result she’s a celebrity. In reality lawyers get press for one of three reasons: changing the law on a fundamental level, being shady AF, or defending/prosecuting someone famous. Anyway. So it begs the question of where her security detail is on the day her precious-in-the-worst-way daughter Enen gets kidnapped. In broad daylight. From sports day at her school. To get her back alive Vicky has to get convicted (that’s important) murderer Daniel Cek Khas (Eason Hong Junjia) exonerated in five days. Vicky starts digging and sure as shit, she uncovers shoddy police work, questionable evidence and a conspiracy involving the dead woman, student Rebecca Liang (Bao Shangen), who’s been painted as a slut in the press, and her nutty boyfriend Jimmy Ahmad (Nine Percent’s Boogie Wang Ziyi), AKA “scarf man”. I shit you not.
Naturally Vicky has help on the investigation side. That would be hot-headed, suspended cop Kim (Taiwanese actor Lee Hong-chi, Long Day's Journey Into Night), because they’re always hot-headed and suspended. Kim – for some reason he’s Korean? – has time on his hands because he beat the crap out of a suspect, but that’s okay. The guy deserved it, even though Kim has a history of excessive force. The two of them start off by looking at Rebecca’s body again, which is still on a slab in the morgue. Yes. Body’s still there. So according to the five-person script, Rebecca was murdered, autopsied, Daniel was arrested, interrogated, tried, convicted, Rebecca was buried, Enen was kidnapped and Vicky was “hired” for the appeal… while Rebecca was still in the morgue? Now that’s some time dilation, Einstein.
Zhang attended Tisch at NYU for film school, and judging from Last Suspect, she clearly absorbed a great many cop TV tropes (anything with initials: L&O, CSI, FBI, NCIS) during her time there; the film has the pedestrian sheen of television too. She also absorbed the worst instincts of trashy DTV thrillers and gleefully doubled down on them. Last Suspect hinges on a big bad hatching the kind of lunatic “I meant for that to happen” plot you only see in movies, and peppers it with riotous idiocy. There’s a handy deus ex Apple Watch to, you know, keep it current. One of Vicky’s frantic races to outwit the kidnapper and save Enen has her running down a country road… and running… and running… and running. What is this, the runway in Fast and Furious 6? Who thought “Chief Judge” carried weight? Why print someone’s Twitter contacts on paper? Is this really about mother-daughter bonds? Where the fuck are we?
Most baffling is the moral quagmire the film dives into in the last act. Rebecca’s mother, Lin Shue (Kara Wai Ying-hung, Sunshine of My Life) becomes our right/wrong metric as she sits in the courtroom wrestling with her conflicting desires (bonus: Wai has a deliciously unhinged final scene) and Kim’s brutality is ultimately justified. Long before the fifth or sixth ending has come along to reaffirm the righteousness of Chinese law you’ve thrown your hands in the air at the sight of the raging dumpster fire. Like Sound of Freedom: if only it had been a little more inept it could have been one of 2023’s guilty pleasures. — DEK