Heartfall Arises

惊心破

Hong Kong, 2016, colour, 2.35:1, 103 mins.

Director: Wu Pinru 吴品儒 [Ken Wu].

Rating: 3/10.

Wannabe psychothriller of two men hunting a copycat serial killer is shambolic on every level.

STORY

Hong Kong, the present day. While hunting serial killer The General (Gao Weiguang), who has issued a death threat against shady businessman Li Bing (Gao Jie), detective Ma Jin (Xie Tingfeng) shoots The General dead but is himself shot in the chest, requiring immediate heart surgery. Six months later, while recovering in hospital under the care of nurse Mo Xiu (Fan Xiaoxuan), Ma Jin meets another transplant patient, criminal psychology professor Che Jiawei (Liu Qingyun), who like him is also an aficionado of Chinese chess. Twelve months later, Che Jiawei is back at work, and lectures his students about “cellular memory” in the case of organ transplants: what, for instance, would happen to the personality of someone who was the recipient of a serial killer’s heart? Ma Jin is anxious to return to active duty, but his boss (Chen Sixuan) says she needs official approval. However, when Che Jiawei is asked by the police to advise on some recent killings that have the same m.o. as The General’s – isssuing death threats beforehand – he recommends Ma Jin also helps. The latest victim is Li Bing, who escaped death earlier on; others are spread around East Asia. At a cocktail party staked out by the police, Ma Jin spots a young woman (Tong Liya) who seems familiar to him, though he’s never met her before. The party ends in chaos and a Singaporean cruise-company CEO is killed. Afterwards, Ma Jin claims he saw The General disguised as a security officer, though everyone says that’s impossible. He also receives a cake from the young woman, thanking him for saving her in the chaos; they have dinner together and she says he reminds her of her late fiance, especially in his (newly acquired) liking for spicy food. Ma Jin starts to suspect that the killer has a mole in the police force, and that it may be Che Jiawei. When The General issues a death threat against a Thai oil profiteer (Jiang Haowen), and the Interpol officer (Tan Junyan) takes Che Jiawei with him to Bangkok but not Ma Jin, the latter takes things into his own hands. Some questions are answered by events in Thailand, but back in Hong Kong the psychological chess game between Ma Jin and Che Jiawei become increasingly complex.

REVIEW

Four years after the classy whodunit The Bullet Vanishes 消失的子弹 (2012), Hong Kong actors Xie Tingfeng 谢霆锋 [Nicholas Tse] and Liu Qingyun 刘青云 [Lau Ching-wan] reteam on the misguided Heartfall Arises 惊心破, a wannabe psychological crime thriller that sinks with all hands. Where the actors’ understated chemistry as a detective duo was vital in making Bullet come together as a film, in Heartfall there’s zero chemistry between them as a pair of serial-killer hunters who may be somehow implicated in the crimes they’re hunting. Admittedly, neither actor is helped by a script that’s as shambolic as the film’s gobbledygook English title; but even at a craft level this first solo feature by Hong Kong’s Wu Pinru 吴品儒 [Ken Wu], an industry veteran and former assistant director for Ye Weixin 叶伟信 [Wilson Yip] (who takes a producing credit here), is third-rate, with no drama or tension generated by the visuals, music or cutting.

The central mystery is meant to spin around “cellular memory”: does a recipient in an organ transplant take on the characteristics of the donor, especially if (gasp!) the latter was a serial killer. The film clumsily sets up the idea in the opening 15 minutes as a detective is almost killed when hunting down a psycho and requires an immediate heart transplant; later he teams with a criminal psychologist (who’s had a liver transplant) in hunting down a copycat psycho. Both men are also Chinese chess aficionados and just happen to have family names that are the same as those of chess pieces – as does the psycho.

Rich material for a dark psychothriller? Well, yes, but not in the screenplay by Wu and Gu Shuyi 顾舒怡, which always has the feel of reaching beyond its intellectual grasp. Heartfall has lots of supposedly meaningful dialogue about intuition, logic, hallucinations and Chinese chess, as well as repeated references to Nietzsche’s aphorism that if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you; but the film ends up as a series of lacklustre dialogue scenes between Xie and Liu with occasional bits of average action inbetween. After a laughable “solution” to one mystery at the hour mark, the script falls completely apart in the final 40 minutes as it drags itself to a manufactured finale.

Neither Liu, 52, nor the younger Xie, 36, looks remotely engaged in the film beyond hitting his marks and getting home for dinner – especially the latter, whose glacial expression matches the coldly-lit, spare settings in which Wu and his d.p., US-born, Australia-based Sion Michel (Hot Summer Days 全城热恋  热辣辣, 2010; The Unbearable Lightness of Inspector Fan 暴走神探, 2015), place the characters. China’s Tong Liya 佟丽娅 and Taiwan singer-actress Fan Xiaoxuan 范晓萱 have nothing roles as fiancees, while Hong Kong’s Tan Junyan 谭俊彦 (son of veteran actor Di Long 狄龙) is purely beefcake as an Interpol cop and Cai Hanyi 蔡瀚亿 is only there to represent Generation iPod. The limited action staging by Huang Weiliang 黄伟亮 [Jack Wong] is nothing special and, even when the score is beavering away on the soundtrack, the film generates minimal tension thanks to Wu’s direction, which never establishes any visual rhythm.

Though technically a Hong Kong production, the film was majority funded by companies in the Mainland, where the film was released in 3-D under the slightly different Chinese title 惊天破. For such a production, it underperformed in China, taking only RMB114 million. Wu previously co-directed, with fellow industry veteran Lao Jianhua 劳剑华, the so-far-unreleased rom-com China Good Groom 中国好新郎, shot in 2013 and starring An Zhijie 安志杰 [Andy On] and Mainland actresses Zhou Weitong 周韦彤 and Zhang Yao 张瑶.

CREDITS

Presented by Sil-Metropole Organisation (HK).

Script: Wu Pinru, Gu Shuyi. Original story: Wu Pinru. Photography: Sion Michel. Editing: Huang Hai. Music: Lin Junhui, Chen Yubin. Art direction: Liu Linghui. Costumes: Huang Jiabao [Stephanie Wong]. Styling: Yu Jia’an [Bruce Yu]. Action: Huang Weiliang [Jack Wong]. Visual effects: Zheng Wenzheng.

Cast: Xie Tingfeng [Nicholas Tse] (Ma Jin/John), Liu Qingyun [Lau Ching-wan] (Che Jiawei/Calvin), Tong Liya (Chen Xiangru, The General’s fiancee), Fan Xiaoxuan (Mo Xiu, Ma Jin’s fiancee), Chen Sixuan (He Yaxin, senior police officer), Tan Junyan (Gao Mingdong, Interpol officer), Gao Weiguang (Jiang Xiaojun/The General; Jiang Xiaodong, his younger twin brother), Cai Hanyi (Zaizai, young police officer), Yu Qiao (police clerk), Gao Jie [Jack Kao] (Li Bing), Jiang Haowen [Philip Keung] (Zhuo Nalong), Yuan Fuhua (Taiwan doctor), Zhong Jinghui (Zhang Dongshuai), Deng Cuiwen (Che Jiawei’s wife), Li Xinqiao (Qiqi, Che Jiawei’s daughter), Xie Zhilun (female MC), Lin Jiahua, Guo Zijian [Derek Kwok].

Release: Hong Kong, 20 Oct 2016.