No Drugs in the World
天下无毒
China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 86 mins.
Director: Tan Xinming 谭鑫铭.
Rating: 3/10.
Totally routine police drama, co-produced with the China Narcotics Control Foundation.
STORY
Somewhere in southern China, mid-1990s. The police raid a village and a family makes a run for it; in the panic, the mother (He Ling) falls over a cliff and the father (Guo Kai) leaves behind his three-year-old daughter Diandian (Li Jiayi) to be cared for by the authorities. Some 20 years later, in a border city in the South, the police hear that an overseas drug group from Northern Burma has set up locally, headed by Ma Xingfu (Pengpeng Hu), aka Zhang Guoping, a druglord aged around 50. Working undercover as a model, policewoman Zhou Ting (Xi Wang) gets hired by Ma Xingfu as she reminds him of his missing daughter. Meanwhile, Ma Xingfu tips off the police and they raid a night club controlled by rival druglord Panther (Liu Jun). After winning a competition in Hangzhou, Ma Xingfu’s woman, professional model Dong Xin (She Lili), returns and tells him she set up a drug deal with a South Korean while there. (Though he’s changed his name and face, Ma Xingfu is the man who abandoned his daughter Diandian some 20 years ago.) One night Zhou Ting helps capture two of Panther’s men sent to kill Ma Xingfu, so he sends her and his right-hand man Zhang Qiang (Zhou Wei) to negotiate a deal with Panther: exchanging Panther’s two assassins (plus some cash) for a narcotics formula that Ma Xingfu wants, PM3. The deal goes well and Ma Xingfu promotes Zhou Ting; but Dong Xin is jealous of Zhou Ting’s rapid rise, and Ma Xingfu has her investigated.
REVIEW
A totally routine police drama, co-produced with the China Narcotics Control Foundation, No Drugs in the World 天下无毒 has little to recommend it apart from a firm-jawed performance by Hangzhou-born actress Xi Wang 奚望 as an undercover policewoman and fruity playing by character veteran Pengpeng Hu 碰碰胡, aka Hu Jianlin 胡建林, as a cackling druglord who may or may not be her long-lost father. Neither makes the film – shot in Aug 2017 and finally released three years later, to a weedy RMB1 million box office – particularly worth watching.
Technical credits are so-so, on the level of an average TV drama, and the script by Yan Manying 鄢满英 is by-the-numbers. Action is perfunctory. In her first film lead after mostly TV roles, Xi, 26 at the time of shooting, recalls stony-faced heroines in Hong Kong policewoman dramas of the 1980s, while Hu also mirrors villains from the same era’s playbook. The film is something of a family affair, with Xi’s stepfather, actor Liu Zhibing 刘之冰, playing the police chief who took care of the lead character as a child and Xi’s mother, actress Ru Ping 茹萍, playing her foster mother. Director Tan Xinming 谭鑫铭 previously co-directed, with Liao Hui 廖晖, the 2011 drama 少年达佳 (literally, “Dajia in Her Youth”), also written by Yan. The film was shot in and around Huaihua city, Hunan province, southern China.
CREDITS
Presented by Hunan Jintao Film & TV Media (CN).
Script: Yan Manying. Photography: Huang Ji. Editing: Zhao Yawei. Music: Liu Le. Art direction: Liao Jianheng. Styling: Meng Jie. Sound: Wang Hanjin, Tan Long. Action: Lei Junjie. Executive direction: Guo Kai.
Cast: Liu Zhibing (Liu, police chief), Xi Wang (Zhou Ting), Pengpeng Hu [Hu Jianlin] (Ma Xingfu/Zhang Guoping), Ru Ping (Mrs. Zhou, Zhou Ting’s foster-mother), Wang Jingbo (Chen Kai, police officer), Zhou Wei (Zhang Qiang, Ma Xingfu’s right-hand man), She Lili (Dong Xin), Liu Jun (Hei Bao/Panther/Yan Bo), Zheng Zhifu (Zheng), He Ling (Shulan, Zhou Ting’s birth mother), Li Jiayi (young Zhou Ting/Diandian), Ji Cheng (Du Lei, narcotics scientist), Guo Kai (younger Ma Xingfu), Zhu Tianyu (Wenzi).
Release: China, 14 Aug 2020.