Junk Food
Is the Luc Besson action factory starting to show its age?
Weekend in Taipei
Director: George Huang • Writers: George Huang, Luc Besson
Starring: Luke Evans, Gwei Lun-mei, Sung Kang, Wyatt Yang, Lu Yi-ching
France / Taiwan / USA • 1hr 41mins
Opens Hong Kong Nov 21 • IIB
Grade: C+
Weekend in Taipei is one of those entirely expendable, cookie-cutter EuropaCorp joints that Luc Besson has mastered over the last 30-odd years. Sure, the French mini-major production house has churned out some accidental gems (Nil by Mouth, Ong Bak, Kursk), but his most profitable and high-profile films have been the globe-trotting actioners, usually featuring a maverick pit bull cop/INTERPOL/DEA agent with special skills on a mission for… justice? Revenge? Something like that. Said pit bull is Jason Statham’s courier badass in The Transporter, Guy Pearce’s wrongly convicted CIA badass in Lockout, most famously Liam Neeson’s retired CIA badass dad in Taken. Sometimes Besson and his army of workmanlike filmmakers (Olivier Megaton, Louis Leterrier, Gérard Krawczyk) gets creative: Sasha Luss’s KGB agent-turned-fashion model badass in Anna and Scarlett Johansson’s student-turned-evolved superbrain badass in Lucy. And the fewer words in the title the better. Now, I’m not saying these aren’t entertaining; the majority are. But they’re B schlock and they know it.
Weekend In Taipei goes a little above and beyond schlocky, cursed by confounding casting choices and an aggressive disregard for logic – and yes, I’m well aware that Lucy’s whole thing rests on the hoary we-only-use-10%-of-our-brains malarkey. But when it comes to illogic, go big or go home. It’s the little details that will kill you. But if you’re jonesing for the next Statham fist-fest or the return of the true Messiah, Gerard Butler (Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, January), you could do worse than Weekend in Taipei.
Jason Statham, erm, Liam Neeson…uh Luke Evans
And really, you wouldn’t be faulted for expecting a tiny bit more given the director and co-writer George Huang burst out of USC with one of the GOAT Hollywood satires, Swimming with Sharks (a must-see if you can get past Kevin Spacey – who’s nonetheless brilliant). Huang’s got bite, even if he hasn’t really shown it since that stellar debut. Still. One can hope.
Welp. Keep hoping. Weekend in Taipei starts with the central maverick pit bull of the day, DEA agent John Lawlor (Luke Evans), being told by his boss Charlotte (Pernell Walker) to take a vacation. He’s in the doghouse (of course) for some rogue shit he pulled on an undercover job in a Chinese restaurant – that also serves crème brûlée. The most interesting part of the undercover rogue action is that a cheese grater makes yet another appearance as a weapon, after Evil Dead Rise and Boy Kills World. Naturally, he takes that vacation where Lawlor’s teflon target lives. Korean seafood titan/drug trafficker King Kwang (Sung Kang, looking like your favourite uncle trying to be threatening and failing) lives in Taipei (allegedly Hong Kong in early story drafts) with his reformed ace wheelman and current wife Joey (Gwei Lun-mei, Black Coal, Thin Ice) and her son, Raymond (newbie Wyatt Yang) – who hates him for a being an environmental menace. If you’re surprised at the fact Joey and Lawlor have a romantic past you haven’t seen enough of these movies. Anyway, Lawlor’s plans to meet up with the mole in Kwang’s organisation are blow, and he winds up on the run with Joey and Raymond and hiding with her granny (Tsai Ming-liang regular Lu Yi-ching). Later, they get the bad guys.
There’s very little in Weekend in Taipei that hasn’t been done before, often better, in other films – many of them by EuropaCorp. For all the urban Taiwanese alleyways and rural hills cinematographer Colin Wandersman (Dogman) has to exploit there’s no personality to the space or physical context to make the story feel more vivid. Well, maybe except for the fact that maybe Taiwan highways are for time travelling. Lawlor, Joey and Raymond’s flight to Joey’s seaside hometown takes all night; it takes Raymond about 20 minutes to get back to the city the next day. Amazing. It’s that laziness that does Weekend more than anything else: Walker might as well yell for Lawlor’s badge, goddammit – as cop bosses usually do. At least she’s as thinly drawn as the rest of the supporting sketches, including Kwang’s main hench Bolo (Patrick Lee Pei-hsu) and the Taipei investigator (Tuo Tsung-hua, Marry My Dead Body) barely following Lawlor’s trail of destruction. What’s with the busted wigs in flash-back? And enough with obviously empty vessels as props. How about some water in that coffee cup or a few copies of the script in those Chanel bags to make it at least look like there’s something inside? Yes, that crap happens in all movies. But it’s that much more glaring when the characters are this bland, the actors are this miscast – Gwei, Kang and Evans deserve better – the story is this obvious and the action is this low energy. Yeah, you could do worse, but you could also do better.