Pervert Hero

怪癖英雄

China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 92 mins.

Director: Wang Zhaoda 王照达.

Rating: 5/10.

Spaghetti Western riff is occasionally amusing but lacks any special touch or invention.

STORY

Somewhere in remote western China, Early Republic, Warlord Era, the 1920s. Kitchen-Knife Granny (Jiao Jiao), owner of the Golden Gunman Inn in the desert township of Hualiu, tells her customers how several years ago the sharpshooting bandit Golden Gunman held up a warlord’s convoy, in which she was held captive, and stole his gold before riding off into the desert and hiding the loot. Still in awe of him, even though she never saw his face, Kitchen-Knife Granny named her inn after him, as he’d also fixed her buck teeth with an expertly aimed bullet. Her customers mock her adulation of the Golden Gunman, calling him “a crazy pervert”. A nameless gunman (Zhang Xiaowei) arrives in Hualiu township, which is torn by two rival gangs, the Hualian gang in black and the Liumen gang in red. The Liumen gang, headed by the dissolute Liu (Wen Qian) has just kidnapped the elder sister (Liu Yiling) of a young boy, Dingdang (Ma Chao). The stranger checks into the Golden Gunman Inn, where Kitchen-Knife Granny thinks he’s just another bandit. After ordering four coffins from the local undertaker, the stranger meets four of Liu’s gang outside town and shoots them all. Later, in a face-off with Liu at the inn, he’s apparently shot by Liu; in fact, as Kitchen-Knife Granny discovers, he caught the bullet in his own gun’s barrel. Dingdang tells the stranger that Kitchen-Knife Granny has sworn to marry the first man who can put a bullet between the eyes of a wooden scarecrow at the inn’s door – a feat which requires a bullet to curve in space, something only the legendary Golden Gunman can do. The following evening the stranger visits Hua (Liu Shuo), boss of the Hualian gang, where he denies he is the Golden Gunman and says he wants to join Hua’s outfit. Next day, Liu kidnaps Dingdang and waits for the stranger to find him. Hua gets hold of half of the map to the Golden Gunman’s hidden loot, and the stranger says he can get him the other half. He then visits Liu, promising him half of the map if he releases Dingdang and his elder sister.

REVIEW

Mainland cinema’s occasional love affair with the Spaghetti Western – which peaked about a decade ago with films like Welcome to Shamatown 决战刹马镇, Wind Blast 西风烈, Let the Bullets Fly 让子弹飞 (all 2010), Scheme with Me 双城计中计 (2012) and its sort-of-sequel For a Few Bullets 快手枪手快枪手 (2016) – blooms again with Pervert Hero 怪癖英雄, in which an unnamed gunslinger arrives in a desert town torn by two rival gangs. A direct riff on Fistful of Dollars Per un pugno di dollari (1964), it’s the first theatrical feature by writer-director Wang Zhaoda 王照达, and bills itself as “a western black comedy”. It’s an easy sit but only sporadically hits the target, largely due to a lacklustre screenplay and a shortage of strongly defined performances. Despite all that, it hardly deserved to crash into box-office oblivion with a microscopic RMB143,000.

Little information is available about Wang, who’s apparently acted in several plays and TV dramas as well as written and directed at least two other feature-length comedies for the web – one of which, Dirty King 污王之王 (2016, see poster, left), is also a western black comedy centred on the same lead character but with a different cast. Hero did not have an easy journey to the screen. Shot in late 2017/early 2018 around Lanzhou, Gansu province, it was passed for release in early 2019 but only made it to screens briefly in late 2020. En route, actor-producer Wen Qian 文谦, who played the more dissolute of the two gang heads and was also principal producer on the film, unexpectedly died of a heart attack at his home in Jilin on 10 Jun 2020.

The main problem with Hero is that it’s a blackly-comic riff on a western that was already a black comedy – and therefore requires something more than just sending up the original. After a promising exposition, the film starts running out of puff in the second act as the script starts going round in circles. At the hour mark a lot of new plot suddenly appears, resulting in an over-busy final half-hour capped by a finale that’s weak on action and disappointing after so much build-up.

The lack of a dominant tone to the film stems from the performances, which range from laconic and restrained to verbose and knockabout; as a result there’s little underlying tension to hold the whole thing together as it goes from tips of the hat to the Clint Eastwood film (ordering coffins before a gunfight) to a poorly structured backstory about some treasure hidden by the mysterious stranger. The two leads are both disciples of veteran standup comic Zhao Benshan 赵本山 and studied the northeast’s errenzhuan 二人转 song’n’dance genre. But as the gun-slinging stranger, Liaoning-born Zhang Xiaowei 张小伟, 44, is miscast, looking more like a middle-aged insurance salesman than a charismatic anti-hero and his style of comedy ill-fitted to the role. Maybe that’s the main joke, but it’s not enough to sustain an entire feature film. As the inn-owner who idolises his memory but doesn’t recognise him in the flesh, actress Jiao Jiao 娇娇, 34, is okay without being anything special – rather like Wang’s direction and the whole movie.

Technical credits are ditto, from the dusty widescreen images of d.p. Sun Qi 孙琪 to the music by Yin Yiming 尹一鸣, with the latter occasionally riffing on Ennio Morricone but also slipping into flamenco for action sequences. The film’s Chinese title roughly means “(The) Weird Hero”, in the sense of playfully eccentric. The rather mis-chosen English title seems to stem from an early scene in which the inn’s customers jokingly dub the legendary hero “a raving pervert” 变态狂, using a word (biàntài 变态) that literally means “abnormal” but is also a common catch-all insult.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Shenghao Feiyang Pictures (CN).

Script: Wang Zhaoda, Xuan Jian, Gao Feng. Photography: Sun Qi. Editing: Aokyu Shinjo. Music: Yin Yiming. Art direction: Liu Rongfeng. Styling: Fan Hongwei. Sound: Zhang Jun. Action: Guo Likun. Executive direction: Guo Likun.

Cast: Zhang Xiaowei (Jinqiangke/Golden Gunman), Jiao Jiao (Caidaopo/Kitchen-Knife Granny), Wen Qian (Liu, boss), Liu Shuo (Hua, boss), Fang Yan (Aardwolf), Ma Chao (Dingdang), Liu Yiling (Xiaoling, Dingdang’s elder sister), Li Xiaobo (Crazy Cripple), Gao Guangming (Right-Eyed Dragon), Zhao Weitao (Left-Eyed Dragon), Zhang Jiahao, Guo Yi (customers at inn), Zhang Ziqi (Little Brother).

Release: China, 13 Nov 2020.