Movie Review: Control/ 控制

An unnamed city, somewhere in the future. Technology (and advertising) abound. 

Daniel Wu plays a lowly insurance agent whose most pressing conflict is finding the money to send his mother, played by Kara Hui, to a decent retirement home.

Her current one is a dump.

A seemingly random discovery leads to crossing a moral line for professional as well as financial reasons.

This sets in motion a nightmare of manipulation, surveillance, and violence.

The film opens really strongly. Through the use of visual effects, the setting is laid out during the opening credits; an unnamed city in the future. The CG is obvious, but you can’t really expect anything else, and I thought it looked really good.

The science fiction aspect of the setting provides a useful feeling of strangeness and separation that contributes to the story.

Over the course of the film, Daniel Wu is given a number of tasks to fulfill, each one worse than the last.

He meets an interesting cast of characters along the way, some new, some old, and some who are not what they seem.

Simon Yam is very entertaining as Tiger, a mob boss who thinks Daniel Wu’s character has ripped him off.

I don’t want to say anything else about the plot because it would possibly spoil the movie.

Speaking of spoilers… and spoiling, let’s talk about the ending.

SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING

The reveal in this film was a big disappointment to me.

It wasn’t even unique.

A lot of movies, Chinese or otherwise, have a premise about an evil mastermind and his manipulation of innocent people to do his evil deeds.

And a good number of them also have a big ‘twist’ where actually, “Ha ha ha, you weren’t manipulating me, I was manipulating you, because I am so smart you can’t imagine, and even though I wouldn’t really be able to control you this way in real life, the scrīpt says I can, so you lose! Ha ha ha!”

Even worse, you’ll never guess who the hero was actually working for.

Or, if you know about the rules for movies to get into China, then you probably do know exactly who he was working for.

Hey, movies are expensive, and shutting yourself out of the China market doesn’t make financial sense.

So you just write a clumsy ending that sacrifices narrative sense on an altar with the SARFT logo on it.

In addition, it not only feels too long, it also re-tells the entire story.

It’s really a shame, because it pretty much pisses away all the good will and momentum the movie had built up with me.

I wanted to like this movie, and I really enjoyed the first two acts.

The third one just lost me.