The Longest Shot
最长1枪
China/Australia, 2019, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 121 mins.
Director: Xu Shunli 徐顺利.
Rating: 5/10.
Clever plotting can’t compensate for weak characterisation in this 1930s Shanghai crime drama.
STORY
Shanghai, Dec 1935. Gang warfare has broken out in the French concession and Wang Libo (Xu Yajun), leader of the Chinese business community, becomes angry when his younger brother Wang Lihai, a cook, is found dead. Business among all the city’s elders has been affected by the feud between Wang Libo and Irish businessman Peter Engman (Christopher Downs), with Wang Libo killing five people in revenge for his brother’s death. Meanwhile, Zhao (Wang Zhiwen), the city’s chief contract killer who also runs a small watch-repair business, has been suffering from trembling hands – a problem that made him botch his last assignment. His doctor has no solution, but Zhao wants to do one last job before retiring. Fouquet (Fabien Lucciarini), the French concession’s police chief, brings Wang Libo and Peter Engman together and tells them the gang warfare must stop. In fact the situation has being secretly orchestrated by another of the city’s elders – Wang (Gao Jie), who invites everyone to a charity gala event to celebrate his birthday on 31 Dec. On the suggestion of his aide Tang (Yu Ailei), Wang agrees to hire Zhao – via the city’s top asssassination broker Du Liqun (Li Liqun) – to kill Wang Libo and/or Peter Engman at the gala. Meanwhile, following an attempt on his life, Peter Engman learns that his lover, Xue’er (Yu Nan), leaked the information where he would be; she says she didn’t realise people wanted to kill him. Peter Engman asks Du Liqun to hire an assassin to pretend to kill him at the gala, so his men can then shoot the assassin. Du Liqun assigns the job to Gua (Zhao Bingrui), a young contract killer from Guangdong who just messed up a job. And then Wang Libo asks Du Liqun to find him a reliable assassin whom he’ll brief himself. Du Liqun gives the job to Zhao, who is told by Wang Libo to wound Fouquet at the gala with two real bullets and then pretend to kill Wang Libo with a third bullet, a blank. Zhao visits Luc (Konstantin Koniukhov), a Russian friend and onetime pupil who now runs a barber’s and has a Chinese wife and young daughter, and leans on him to kill Peter Engman at the gala. Suspicious, Luc hires Gua’s younger brother, Bao (Bai Shu), to follow Zhao, but Zhao spots him and in a scuffle Bao ends up dead and Zhao wounded. Next evening the concession’s glitterati assemble for Wang’s birthday charity gala.
REVIEW
An elaborate chess game between business leaders and professional assassins in 1930s Shanghai, The Longest Shot 最长1枪 falls short due to a script that isn’t up to the job. A strong cast of seasoned actors still provides several pleasures but there’s no sense of interior tension to give the long-signalled finale its expected power. Entirely shot in and around Melbourne, this Chinese-Australian co-production looks just as convincing as the hordes of Mainland productions set during the same period, and the relative lack of exteriors actually helps to underline the sense of a story taking place in a self-contained world divorced from normal life. But the failure to blend a Swiss Clock-like plot with interesting characters undermines the film’s good points. The result failed to click with Mainland audiences, grossing a meagre RMB8 million.
Shot is the first feature by middle-aged director Xu Shunli 徐顺利, who worked for many years in the advertising industry. He makes a generally good fist of the job on a technical level, with experienced d.p. Zhao Xiaoshi 赵晓时 (Forever Enthralled 梅兰芳, 2008; Wheat 麦田, 2009; Personal Tailor 私人订制, 2013) making the noirish most of shadowy interiors and back alleys in wintry 1930s Shanghai; the sparse score, however, by Australia-based composers Burkhard Dallwitz and Brett Aplin adds little. Individual performances, by a seasoned cast, are of a generally high calibre, led by veterans Wang Zhiwen 王志文 (in a rare leading role) giving a master-class in minimal acting as the ageing hitman who takes on one last job and Taiwan’s Li Liqun 李立群 (so good as the weary patriarch in What a Wonderful Family 麻烦家族, 2017) as the city’s top broker for assassins.
The subtly-charged scenes together by Wang, 53, and Li, 67, are among the best in the movie, but they’re also complemented by several other veterans such as TV’s Xu Yajun 许亚军 as the louche leader of the business community (with a bizarre interest in ballet), Taiwan’s Gao Jie 高捷 [Jack Kao] – without whom no gangster film would be complete – as a manipulative elder, and reliable character actor Yu Ailei 余皑磊 as his shifty aide. Among the younger players, Zhao Bingrui 赵炳锐 (aka Zhao Mingyue 赵铭岳) has his moments as a retired killer from Guangdong who’s drawn into the complex web of betrayal.
On the debit side, Montréal-born, Taiwan-based compere/actor Christopher Downs 夏克立, 47, who became known in the Mainland for the TV docu-soap Dad, Where Are We Going? 爸爸去哪儿 (2015), distractingly over-acts as an Irish businessman who causes most of the trouble and for some reason wears a kilt in the finle. In the only sizeable female role, Mainland actress Yu Nan 余男 is wasted as his maybe duplicitous lover; with almost no dialogue until the finale, she mostly just looks confused.
Aside from the major (directorial?) miscalculation of Downs’ performance, most of the film’s other faults derive from the screenplay by Qiu Xinyu 邱欣宇, a creative director from the advertising world, who tries to create a super-complex plot of conflicting power-plays and hitmen contracts but fails to background his characters in an involving way. Wang’s lead is a case in point, with no reason given for the audience to empathise with the kindly but cold-blooded assassin who’s at the end of his career and finds himself trapped by two conflicting assignments. For a story that has so many power-brokers entering their final furlong within a doomed society, there’s also no sense of twilight to the drama: though individual scenes are effective, largely thanks to actors’ charisma, the portrait of a dog-eat-dog world only months from the Sino-Japanese War is curiously uninvolving, and the grand finale – as well as being impossible to follow amid all the gunplay – lacks the power it should have. There’s the inescapable feeling that The Longest Shot wants to be a Shanghai gangster epic along the lines of The Wasted Times 罗曼蒂克消亡史 (2016) but lacks the necessary style, budget and creative talent.
For the record, in addition to Mandarin and English, a variety of dialects are spoken, from Shanghainese through Anhuinese to Cantonese. The role of a newsboy who’s almost like an adoptive son to Wang’s hitman is played by the actor’s own son, Wang Guanjie 王冠杰.
CREDITS
Presented by Saints Entertainment (CN), Lighstream Pictures (AU), Huace Pictures (Tianjin) (CN), Beijing Yuanshan Culture Communication (CN), Shandong Film & TV Production (CN).
Script: Qiu Xinyu. Photography: Zhao Xiaoshi, Li Qiang. Editing: Qi Huali. Music: Burkhard Dallwitz, Brett Aplin. Art direction: Meng Xun, Otello Stolfo. Styling: Xu Jianshu [Lawrence Xu]. Sound: Wen Bo, Paul Pirola. Visual effects: John Francis.
Cast: Wang Zhiwen (Zhao), Yu Nan (Xue’er/Snowy), Li Liqun (Du Liqun), Xu Yajun (Wang Libo), Christopher Downs (Peter Engman), Gao Jie [Jack Kao] (Wang), Yu Ailei (Tang), Zhao Bingrui (Gua, elder brother), Bai Shu (Bao, young brother), Fabien Lucciarini (Fouquet), Konstantin Koniukhov (Luc), Wang Guanjie (newsboy), Zhou Yemang (Zhou), Pierre Bourdaud (Fouquet’s translator), Wang Baoshan (Gu, old friend of Wang), Li Jing (Zheng), Xu Zidong (Sun, secretary), Shi Shang (Xiaochou/Reekie), Hou Xiang (Si/Ass), Da Xiong (Da Xiong), Huang Yan (Tsukamoto), Ted Duran (Paul, Peter Engman’s assistant), Byron Gibson (Hans), Julian Gaertner (Anderson, Peter Engman’s assistant), James Lee Guy (big Russian), Maksim Manylov (Russian bodyguard), Li Lie (Luc’s wife), Liu Linian (laughing man), Wang Xiuqiang (Ma), Zhang Jing (Du Liqun’s wife), Liu Nanying (Du Liqun’s daughter).
Release: China, 6 Sep 2019; Australia, 5 Sep 2019.