Movie Review: White Vengeance/鴻門宴

Where’s the white people?

A truncated Gang of Film (電影人幫) ventured to the Golden Harvest in Mongkok last Thursday night to catch  White Vengeance/鴻門宴, the latest film from director Daniel Lee/李仁港.

He directed Black Mask.

Then again, he directed Dragon Squad. 

And Three Kingdoms.

And 14 Blades.

But hey, I figured this film would at least be entertaining.

Let’s look at the obvious reasons why:

Costume/historic/period piece. A Chinese blockbuster, if you will.  Big production, large-scale battle-type stuff.  Grand sets.  Lots of neat-looking costumes.

“Leon Lai and Gaile Lok were married in a small ceremony in the Forbidden City…”

In America, we call them popcorn movies. You do a lot more chewing than thinking.

Like marriage.

In Hong Kong, you could call them Siu Mai/燒賣 films because they sell it at the concession stand.

And as often as I smell it in the cinema, I think it may be more popular.

But never mind.

I went to see this movie based mostly on who was in it. It has some of my favorite actors.

Like Zhang Hanyu. If he’s in a movie, I’m in the cinema. I really enjoy watching Zhang Hanyu in just about anything.

Well, except a Speedo.

I think he’s a good actor, and he has that sort of screen presence that you basically have to be born with.

It helps if you’re not wearing a really stupid hat.

The film has Anthony Wong hamming it up.

HAM is an acronym for High As a Motherf@#$er. 

White Vengeance/鴻門宴 has  Liu Yifei, whom I have almost forgiven for being in Forbidden Kingdom.

Dude, is she looking at my junk?

She’s not a bad actress, and she’s not difficult to look at.

More like Bizarre…

I don’t even confuse her with Eva Huangany more.

But that’s mostly because Liu Yifei doesn’t have a lazy eye.

Er, no, Ms Huang, I wasn’t talking about your… I mean,what lazy eye?

I really shouldn’t talk badly about Eva Huang. It’s not her fault, and it’s not like I’d refuse to catch her if she threw herself at me.

I’ve got a beach spike. 

But in a match between the two, I’ve gotta go with Liu Yifei just because she doesn’t have that… eye thing.

F@#$ me, it’s contagious!

 Jesus, where was I?

White Vengeance/鴻門 also has Wu Ma/午馬.

Which is Chinese for winning.

Especially if you’re still making movies at 103.

Speaking of older actors, it also has Chen Kuan Tai/陳觀泰.

噓遐.

Chen Kuan Tai and Zhang Hanyu star in Sushi Ninjas.

Speaking of martial arts actors, White Vengeance/鴻門宴 also has Andy On/安志傑.

At the video shoot for his upcoming K-Pop single.

He’s been steadily working his way up the martial arts film ladder, such that he is now one of the guys who gets to fight Donnie Yen.

Of course, he always loses, but that’s because Donnie Yen cannot not win.

But that’s not Andy’s fault. And it’s not like he hasn’t worked really hard to get where he is.

Like professional wrestling, martial arts movies aren’t real. But in both of those fields, there is a lot of very real physical exertion and danger.

Ever see the scar on Andy’s lip?

Crazy Night Out?

Call 1-800-BAIL-BONDS

That scar is from making Three Kingdoms. He took a spear to the face. While riding a horse. At speed.  What’s that you say? “It was just a movie spear?”  Tell that to his face.  Or the 7 surgeries he went through to fix it.

I wouldn’t wish that sort of injury on anyone (except maybe Christine To), and I really do respect and admire Andy for going through the injury and the surgeries and then (literally and figuratively) climbing right back up on the horse.

What I always admire about martial artists in films isn’t any sort of imagined real-life ability, but the willingness and skill and dedication they show simply to entertain people.  And admit it, we’ve been pretty thoroughly entertained over the years by martial arts actors. 

A long time ago, I interviewed Ti Lung/狄龍, who bemoaned what he saw as a lack of discipline and backbone in today’s actors. I’ll never forget what he told me: “When I worked at Shaw Brothers, you’d go to work every day not knowing if maybe today you’d get set on fire or have your leg broken. But you know what? That was the job, and we did it!”

I’m fairly certain Ti Lung wouldn’t include Andy in the group he was talking about, and neither would I.

I have only one thing to say to Andy On:

Wow, that got away from me.

But I think you see my point.

White Vengeance/鴻門宴 theoretically had a whole lot going for it up front.

Which is why it’s a shame it turned out to be such a horrid f@#$ing mess.

The biggest problem with it, and its not an uncommon problem, is the approach to the source material.

Like most (?) Chinese period films, its based on a well-known story.

But that’s the problem.

It’s actually two problems.

[flexes PhD muscle]

First of all, Chinese culture and communication are often called high context. This means that people learn things through observation and experience rather than being told.

Example: I used to ask people for advice on how to fight over the bill in the restaurant, which is a common cultural behavīor here. Everyone I asked told me they knew how to do it, but none of them could tell/teach me how. They learned by watching and I had to do the same thing.

 I solved it by making a point of discreetly informing the waiter/waitress that when we called for the bill, if it wasn’t given to me I would kill (and eat) their whole family. Works like a charm.

But it illustrates my point.

The same goes for the appearance of Guan Yu statues in Hong Kong movies.

You know, the red faced guy.

Yeah, him. 

He appears in a lot of movies, usually as a statue but occasionally as a character, but no one ever tells you who he is or why he’s important. They assume you already know.

Because they’re right about that 99% of the time.

Contrast this with Hollywood movies and the low-context culture from which they spring.

Your average Die Hard-type film always features dialogue or even a scene where a lowly detective gives a Power Point presentation about the bad guy so you know who he is, what he did, what he intends to do, and why it’s his mother’s fault that he’s this way.

This helps the viewer understand the story and the characters.  It’s called  exposition.

There’s no Chinese word for it because in Chinese movies it doesn’t f@#$ing exist.

Chinese films will never do well outside of Chinese audiences unless they start to make it possible for people who don’t already know the story to follow the film.

In other words, they can’t recap the story, they have to  tell it.

Bob Dylan is not in this film. But somehow this turned up pretty early in the image search, so here you go.

White Vengeance/鴻門宴 plays like a highlight reel taken from a miniseries of the original story.

It dispenses with detail, background, buildup, and logic, and just throws a series of incidents and scenes at you in a very haphazard way.

Oddly, it does it two ways: It presents scenes that you know  should   be full of pathos and emotional energy by the way they’re being played.

But unless you already know the story, you have been given no idea why this is important or how it got to be  important.

You can’t buy into the story emotionally because the story hasn’t given you anything to buy into.  It just goes straight to the money shot.

Now that’s an uncomfortable twist to the metaphor.

It happens more than once.

我有九十九個問題，這些母狗是他們三個。

The other real problem is when scenes get dragged out much too long, to the point that they ease right on up to the brink of farce.

And sometimes they take their pants off and jump over the brink, laughing and screaming as they plunge.

So now you can’t get involved with the film because the only emotion you feel is disdain.

First **White Vengeance/鴻門宴 confuses you, then it bores you.**

Like marriage.

It’s a shame the narrative is such a mess, because there are some good moments in this movie.

There are some very good action scenes, especially the smaller-scale ones. Andy On is literally the only action star in this film.  I wish he was in more of  White Vengeance/鴻門宴  because his scenes were fun and exciting to watch.

Andy’s convincing in his scenes, and he’s really gotten very, very impressive at doing action.  All I’ve  ever asked of action stars is that they be convincing. Make me believe you can really do that stuff.

“K-pop single, huh? ”

Speaking of convincing, I have to say that a lot of the CGI just wasn’t.

It made most of the large-scale scenes look bad. I used to admire films made in China because when you needed 10,000 people to march through a valley they would go get 10,000 people and march them through a valley.

Now they just use a computer.

An old computer.

But it’s not all the computer’s fault. The set designers deserve blame too.

Sets can be skillfully painted so that new plaster looks like centuries-old and weather-beaten rock, metal, or wood.

Or you can do what White Vengeance/鴻門宴 does and just make it look cheap and fake.

Note to set dressers: One problem with higher definition in film is that brush strokes are much clearer. You’re gonna need more time, money or effort. Probably all three.

These are some of the things that kept shoving me out of the movie and back into the cinema. What I mean is that I spent way too much of my time being aware of sitting and watching a movie instead of just watching it.

Some of the dramatic scenes in  White Vengeance/鴻門宴 have real tension.

Unfortunately, most of the others really don’t, and they often end up being played so far over the top that you can’t take them seriously.

Anthony Wong ends up looking and sounding a lot like a cross between Tommy Chong and Yoda:

“煙, 你會…”

This inanity proves contagious, and makes a scene that is intended to be fraught with tension laugh-out-loud funny instead.

As Kozo pointed out, a person responding to losing badly at Go by spitting blood belongs in a Stephen Chow movie and virtually nowhere else.

Especially not in a movie that’s not supposed to be a comedy.

“Guess where this is going, Kozo.”

I actually felt bad watching the final scene between Liu Yifei and Feng Shao Feng because in almost any other circumstances I might actually have gotten caught up in it. It had the potential to be, at least for me, quite touching.

Unfortunately, by the time it happened, White Vengeance/鴻門宴 had absolutely beaten every shred of sympathy out of me such that I couldn’t.

“這個白人男子是報復性的!!!”

That’s my lasting impression about watching **White Vengeance/鴻門宴:  disappointment and regret. I had even said before the film that I was afraid to let my expectations, low as they were, cause me to be optimistic or excited about the film.**

I honestly wish I wasn’t so right.

All I wanted was to be entertained. Is that so wrong?

Instead I got a scrīpt that was sent through a shredder before it was used to make a film, and the resultant plot holes being filled by overacting and tedium.

Oh, and I got Anthony Wong acting like an irritating pothead.

“What part of 噗,噗,給 does this motherf@#$er not understand???”

One final beef I had with  **White Vengeance/鴻門宴**** has to do with Visualizer Film Production. Their slug (the little blurb before the film title to advertise themselves) uses the trademarked voice of Godzilla. It’s not a generic sound. It’s not public domain. Myself and at least one other Gang member wondered aloud why they would do that. So I know I wasn’t hearing things that weren’t there.**

And neither will you. Their website, which is under construction, defaults to the slug. Listen to it. It’s as plain as day right there at the end. All I have to say is f@#$ ‘em for being so cheap and stupid.

I’m emailing Toho in about thirty seconds.

For that and other reasons, I suppose it wouldn’t be out of order to call this review White Vengeance.