Detective Chinatown 3
唐人街探案3
China, 2021, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 136 mins.
Director: Chen Sicheng 陈思诚.
Rating: 4/10.
Despite a sparky opening, this has many of the previous entry’s faults, with weak plotting, no fresh thinking and a running time that’s endless.
STORY
Tokyo, Jul 2019. Bangkok private investigator Tang Ren (Wang Baoqiang) and his distant cousin Qin Feng (Liu Haoran), a failed police academy student and crime-fiction fan, fly in from New York and are met at Narita airport by Noda Hiroshi (Tsumabuki Satoshi), a wealthy Japanese-Chinese private detective who has invited them (and especially Qin Feng) to help solve a locked-room murder mystery. At the airport they are almost kidnapped by Vietnamese members of the Southeast Asia United Army, and a huge fight breaks out in the main hall. In the underground they are then set upon by – and manage to escape from – Jack Jaa (Tony Jaa), a retired policeman, Muay Thai champion and Thailand’s No. 1 detective, who’s also arrived in Japan. The case is the death of Su Chaiwit (Motokazu Hirayama), president of the Southeast Asian Chamber of Commerce, who was sponsoring Vietnamese and Malaysian gangs fighting over the development rights of a new Chinatown due to be built in central Tokyo. The main suspect is Watanabe Masaru (Miura Tomokazu), head of East Asia’s biggest mafia, Black Dragon, who was having a one-on-one meeting with Su Chaiwit in the room where he was attacked. Noda Hiroshi has recommended Tang Ren and Qin Feng to Watanabe Masaru, whom they meet in a bathhouse along with his clan leaders. With only a week to go before his trial, Watanabe Masaru offers them 1 billion yen to prove his innocence. (His version of events is that, before signing the deal on the new Chinatown, Su Chaiwit had asked for one more meeting in the Watery Hall 居水堂, a pavilion in a lake that’s reachable by only a single walkway. Su Chaiwit’s assistant, Kobayashi Anna [Nagasawa Masami], had served both men tea before retiring from the room with an old waitress, Yoshimoto Yuki (Matsura Sachiko). The tea had appeared to be drugged, as both men passed out. Watanabe Masaru woke to find Su Chaiwit murdered and both men’s assistants, led by Kobayashi Anna, bursting into the locked room. Su Chaiwit had seemingly been stabbed by a piece of glass from a smashed glass screen, and Watanabe Masaru hand was bleeding. Kobayashi Anna rushed Su Chaiwit in a car to a hospital but he died before surgery.) Tang Ren and Qin Feng inspect the crime scene but it has already been cleaned up by the Japanese police. However, Noda Hiroshi has photos, and explains how Yoshimoto Yuki was found dead next morning, supposedly hung at home. Qin Feng finds a clue – a small metal flask – that means Watanabe Masaru could have knocked out Su Chaiwit. Kobayashi Anna arrives with a team of Thai priests and insists that Watanabe Masaru is guilty of murdering her boss; she claims Su Chaiwit told her in the car to the hospital and that Watanabe Masaru had made advances to her before she left the room. One of the priests turns out to be Jack Jaa in disguise, and he tries to seize the flask as proof of Watanabe Masaru’s guilt. Embarrassed that their client may be the murderer, Tang Ren and Qin Feng decide they need to see Su Chaiwit’s body. With Tang Ren disguised as a corpse, and Qin Feng and Noda Hiroshi as porters, the trio get into the mortuary, where chaos ensues when two other groups also arrive to fix the evidence. Only the arrival of the senior police detective on the case, the brilliant Tanaka Naoki (Asano Tadanobu), stops the chaos. On the new evidence of the flask, which matches a bruise on Su Chaiwit’s head, Tanaka Naoki re-arrests Watanabe Masaru, whose men then hunt down Tang Ren and Qin Feng for failing to protect their boss. Tang Ren, Qin Feng and Noda Hiroshi go to find Kobayashi Anna, whom they think is the key to the case and whom Tang Ren has already fallen for. But they find she’s been kidnapped by Murata Akira (Sometani Shota), a notorious serial killer/rapist and member of the mysterious Q organisation.
REVIEW
Marginally the weakest of the three outings to date, Detective Chinatown 3 唐人街探案3 is a frustrating exercise in a few lessons learned but most others disregarded. Unlike Detective Chinatown 2 唐人街探案2 (2018), it doesn’t just rely on the turbo-charged buffoonery of lead Wang Baoqiang 王宝强 after disregarding most of the story set-up and settling down into a series of comic setpieces. It also revives some of the love of classic crime fiction, and especially the locked-room mystery, that so strongly underpinned the fine 2015 original. But like DC2, the plotting is profligate, there’s little real deduction, and even less sense of location (apart from a few jokes about Japanese neatness and the like). A quarter-of-an-hour longer than the already over-stretched DC2, it feels like it, despite a promising opening. It’s especially disappointing to see creator/writer/director Chen Sicheng 陈思诚 falling back on easy solutions and not trying to advance the series, or at least keep it fresh. Not that he has any incentive, as the franchise appears to be bullet-proof: despite its release being delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic, DC3 took a gigantic RMB4.5 billion during CNY 2021, beaten only by nostalgic comedy Hi, Mom 你好，李焕英. That’s over a billion RMB more than DC2 (RMB3.39 billion) and over five times the first movie’s total (RMB824 million), making it the fifth highest-grossing film of all time in the Mainland.
Things start very promisingly, picking up the story of seedy Bankgok p.i. Tang Ren (Wang) and his young distant cousin, crime-fiction fan Qin Feng (Liu Haoran 刘昊然, developing more personality film by film), as they arrive in Tokyo direct from New York at the invitation of Japanese-Chinese p.i. Noda Hiroshi (Tsumabuki Satoshi 妻夫木聪, reprising his role from DC2). As soon as they emerge in Narita airport, they’re attacked for some reason by Vietnamese terrorists (in an escalating fight that’s visually terrific) and then, escaping on the metro, by another p.i. (and unstoppable Muay Thai champion) who’s also just arrived in the city. The latter is played by Thai action star Tony Jaa, in a role that keeps popping up ominously throughout the film until explained at the end. Though it’s good to see Jaa, now in his mid-40s, back in a major East Asian movie, unfortunately his English dialogue is so heavily accented that it’s impossible for native speakers to understand what he says most of the time, reducing his role to just a lot of glowering.
That’s just the first 10 minutes, which bodes well for the rest of the movie as Noda Hiroshi introduces the duo to powerful crimelord Watanabe Masaru (veteran Miura Tomokazu 三浦友和), who wants them to get him off the hook for a locked-room murder mystery for which he’s the chief suspect. As the two investigate, the clues actually point to their client more and more, with the result that they end up hunted through the city by Watanabe Masaru’s men. Meanwhile, their search for the dead man’s Japanese assistant, Kobayashi Anna (Nagasawa Masami 长泽雅美), uncovers a kidnapping that, half-an-hour into the picture, leads the plot in an entirely different direction.
It’s not unlike the chaotic structure of DC2, which is hardly surprising as three of Chen’s four co-writers are carry-overs from that film. (Newcomer Liu Wusi 刘吾驷 worked on the online drama-series spin-off, Detective Chinatown 唐人街探案, which went out on iQiyi in early 2020, with a different cast and directors but substantially the same writers.) The plot detour, centred on Kobayashi Anna and a mysterious serial murderer known as Q, lasts for the best part of an hour. It’s not until very late that the basic locked-room mystery returns to centre stage, with references to one of the genre’s best-known writers (John Dickson Carr) that recall the original 2015 movie’s love affair with classic detective fiction. But it’s all too little, too late: like so many Chinese crime mysteries, DC3, like DC2, has no evolving deduction, more a series of rapid VFX sequences in which revelations are piled on top of each other with no deductive logic. Qin Feng’s photographic memory, which played a crucial role in the original film, is also made little use of here. As in DC2, his headphone-wearing character is basically there to keep millennial viewers interested and justify all the online/digital references, including the invented crime-solving game Crimaster.
As the loudmouthed, bumpkinesque p.i. from Bangkok’s Chinatown, Wang is reined back a little compared with the previous film as he struts around in his appalling wardrobe as an extreme parody of the badly-mannered overseas Mainland tourist. With his spot-on mimicry of the heavily accented Mandarin of Hong Kong actor Zeng Zhiwei 曾志伟 [Eric Tsang], Wang is often very amusing but, as in DC2, hardly justifies his character’s inclusion (with most of the detecting again done by his young colleague); it would nice to see Chen and his co-writers develop Tang Ren as something more than just a buffoon going from comic setpiece to comic setpiece. Some of the latter are certainly entertaining – especially a 10-minute one staged in a mortuary – but others are just shouting matches or attempts to satirise every genre the writers can think of (electronic games, serial killers, cosplay, sumo, kendo) rather than develop an engrossing whodunit plot.
Despite the film’s sparky opening, a general sense of fatigue sets in around the 50-minute mark, as the relentlessly pacey use of VFX, as well as Tang Ren’s ranting, starts to pall. This is well before a more reflective section about 70 minutes in, but still long before the halfway point in a two-hour-plus movie. The final half-hour just doesn’t know when to quit, with a whole series of flashbacks devoted to one character, then a soppy ending with fireworks and the Michael Jackson song Heal the World, plus yet another ending that seems to set up a young superheroes franchise as well as a sequel.
Among the strong Japanese cast, Tsumabuki reprises his small role of p.i. Noda Hiroshi from DC2 but isn’t given much scope to get in the way; Asano Tadanobu 浅野忠信, now looking distinctly middle-aged, has some brief fun as a pompous police detective; Miura is okay as the crimelord; and veteran actress Suzuki Honami 铃木保奈美 has some more fun in a double role as a judge and a prosecutor.
Technical credits, by the returning team of d.p., composer, editor, art director and action choreographer, are all up to snuff. The film is set, and was shot, in mid-2019 and was originally planned for release during CNY 2020. Originally conceived by Chen as a trilogy set in Bangkok, New York and Tokyo, it now appears – from the star-laden tag at the very very very end of the film – that the franchise will continue for at least one more instalment, with a tale set in London centred on the murky Q.
CREDITS
Presented by Wanda Media (CN), As One Pictures (Beijing) (CN), China Film (CN).
Script: Chen Sicheng, Zhang Chun, Liu Wusi, Lian Zhou [Zhou Zhenni], Yan Yining. Photography: Du Jie. Editing: Tang Hongjia. Music: Wang Zongxian [Nathan Wang], Hu Xiao’ou. Art direction: Li Miao. Styling: Zhang Shijie [Stanley Cheung]. Sound: Wang Gang, Liu Xiaosha. Action: Wu Gang. Visual effects: Xu Mingjun.
Cast: Wang Baoqiang (Tang Ren), Liu Haoran (Qin Feng), Tsumabuki Satoshi (Noda Hiroshi), Tony Jaa (Jack Jaa), Miura Tomokazu (Watanabe Masaru, Black Dragon head), Nagasawa Masami (Kobayashi Anna/Naeko), Asano Tadanobu (Tanaka Naoki, senior superintendent), Sometani Shota (Murata Akira, serial killer), Suzuki Honami (Kawamura Yoshiko, public prosecutor; Kawamura Haruko, head judge), Okuda Eiji (Watanabe Masaru’s father), Shang Yuxian (Kiko, hacker detective), Xiao Yang (Song Yi, member of Q), Qiu Ze (Lin Mo, detective), Zhang Zifeng (Sinuo), Zhang Junning (Ivy, member of Q), Wen Yongshan [Janice Man] (Naeko’s mother), Zhang Yibai (village head in northeast China), Yi Seong-min [Clara Lee] (girl in swimsuit on water scooter), Liu Dehua [Andy Lau] (member of Q), Ma Boqian [Victor Ma] (Yamamoto Yuta), Chen Xiao (Lu Jingjing), Chen Zhiyuan (Noda Koji), Li Mingxuan (Liu Feng), Cui Yuxin (Cheng Tianshun), Zhang Xiran (young Naeko), Kibayashi Shin (owner of clothes shop), Motokazu Hirayama (Su Chaiwit), Musaka Naomasa (senior Black Dragon member), Sako Yoshi (Black Dragon member), Akiyama Yoshihiro (thug), Hashimoto Manami (bath-house receptionist), Nagai Mijika (Reiko, skinny mortuary attendant), Uji Kiyotaka (assistant to Tanaka), Zhang Guoqiang (Qin Feng’s father), Dong Chengpeng [Da Peng] (police academy male interviewer), Chen Zhixi (police academy female interviewer), Lin Muran (young Qin Feng), Tashiro Yoshinori (sumo wrestler), Shimokyo Keiko (air hostess), Matsukado Yohei (prosecuting lawyer), Tani Tehito (old guy in street), Handa Takao (abuser of Naeko’s mother), Furusawa Yusuke (abuser of Naeko’s mother’s shop assistant), Matsura Sachiko (Yoshimoto Yuki, old waitress in Watery Hall), Shogen (Su Chaiwit’s assistant), Chen Sicheng.
Release: China, 12 Feb 2021.