At The Movies: Chinese Crime Thriller Wolf Hiding Is Sunk By Its Sentimentality
106 minutes, start: January 4.
2 stars
The plot: Pay homage to the Hongtai Group of Companies in a fictional Southeast Asian country. Its clean corporate image serves as a front for a crime family dedicated to drug and human trafficking. A lone assassin, Chen An (Nick Chung), begins to disrupt their activities. Mai Long Wen (Ethan Huang) is a police officer determined to capture Chen An, while Ma Wen Kang (Darren Wang) is a Hongtai lieutenant willing to give his life to protect his masters.
Chinese director Mark Ma's debut film is a revenge story inspired by Japanese director Takeshi Kitano's yakuza films, but insists on continuity with a strong sense of old Hong Kong cinema.
The hatred of criminals is relentless. schoolgirls are kidnapped, slave markets are filled with weeping women, and cherubic children cry as thugs invade their neighborhood.
It could be said that this is all part of the story leading to perfect retribution, as the moral debt is paid in blood, but there is a dimension to the depictions of evil that robs them of all emotion.
This may be due to the lack of a moral perspective in the film. think of FBI agent Kate Maser, played by Emily Blunt, who thwarts the horrors of a Mexican cartel in Sicario (2015). Illuminates the spiral of violence created by the "war on drugs" doctrine.
Cheng's killers and Xuan's police are absent or unresponsive, so scenes of grieving children and battered women are presented as naive attempts to induce tears.
Chen Ann's story, which reveals her motivation for turning Rambo against the crime family, is shown in flashbacks. At this point, it's almost obvious that his story of waking up from an ordinary boy is completely sentimental.
Since Hidden Monsters is set somewhere in Southeast Asia, the film's dialogue, mostly in Mandarin, is interspersed with bursts of spoken English as the Hongta members deal with foreign gangsters.
It would be unintentionally hilarious if moments of broken words weren't so painful to experience. Emphasizing the talent of the Caucasian character in the Hollywood film, he addressed the surprised and impressed Chinese in Mandarin.
Such ambiguous moments ruin a good film for native speakers, as American actor Bradley Cooper demonstrated in his confident idiocy in Limitless (2011). Wolf Hiding deserves a Bradley Cooper Linguistics Award.
Warm welcome. the story of a vigilante who takes down a crime family is buried under dense dialogue and action scenes that try to show the coolness of the stars instead of actual action.
