Full River Red

A rather slow and stagnant film in the first half, it was largely driven by charisma of individual actors. Also not helped by the monotonous setting of the film, which is just grey wall and grey sky throughout. But Full River Red quickly picked up steam as twists after twists and as the suspense grew. The movie has a powerful ending as Yue Fei's poem is recited, for which the film is named after. It is not hard to understand why the film had sub a great box office as it is truly a star studded lineup, but perhaps it is a little surprising that the film is more than what is shown on the surface. It is about struggle and standing up to power and desires while being told in a self deficating way.

What saves this story is the performance of the main cast. All actors play their roles passionately, and they are the only real strenght this movie has. The sets are limited but not holding back the movie.

The story is decently captivating. It starts as a whodunnit, that turns into a case of national security. Various factions are in the game, that don't know who to trust. Overall a gripping story, but it does get more nonsensical as it goes on.

The absolute worst part is the music, especially it's volume. Without exaggeration, the music is 10x as loud as the audio. I spent two hours holding the remote, ready to press mute. The music also fits the scenes it's played in poorly, but that would be forgiven if it was not 10x too loud.

I can see that Yimou Zhang tries really hard to have multiple twists in the movie in order to surprise the audience as much as he could, and the movie has some fun moments for sure, but I am not convinced by the final twist - the purposes of the gang, which is to pass on the poem written by Yue Fei before he was executed. This just seems too nationalistic, political, twisted and pointless, and literally makes this movie more like a propaganda movie than a piece of art, as the core value is so twisted!

People's lives are more precious than anything. It's a great deed that people sacrifice themselves to save another's life, but it's just a brain wash that people are willing die to pass on the love to their ruler.

It's really sad to see the twisted value in so many Chinese movies nowadays, and Yimou Zhang just contributed another.

When an ambassador is found stabbed to death, the Prime Minister "Qin Hui" (Jiayin Lei) orders an immediate investigation to be headed by his director "He Li" (Yi Zhang) and his deputy "Wu Yichun" (the quite charismatic Yunpeng Yue). Pretty quickly, this investigation has seen the killing of the Captain of the guard and his replacement by the young "Sun Jun" (Jackson Lee) who has alighted on a potential culprit in "Zhang Da" (Teng Shen). The Prime Minister has given the young man and his prisoner just two hours to get to the bottom of the killing and to retrieve a letter thought to have been contained in an ornate leather purse. For much of the first ninety minutes, this is quite a cleverly interwoven and characterful whodunit. Who to trust, who is behind the plot - what is contained in the letter? Who has read the letter? What might the beautiful courtesans know of the mystery? It's quickly paced and quite entertaining. Sadly, though, the last forty-five minutes rather falls away. The characters all start to trip over themselves and the intrigue stops being that and starts to become a bit of a farce leading to an ending that was really weak and disappointing. It looks great though, the production standards and costumes are professional and colourful - it's just an hour too long - and that's without counting the endless pre-title production credits!

This is a tough movie to get a hold of. The producers apparently described it as a suspense movie with comedic elements, but it is rarely either funny or suspenseful. I'd say it's in part a drama of intrigue, part a mystery, but mainly I'd call it a horror movie because it's got a brutal body count and many deaths are horrifically cruel.

In fact, for me what's most interesting about the movie is how well it portrays a world where the pecking order involves who can kill who, making life cheap as people use murder to impress or jockey for position. It's actually a good example of a systemic issue - it's a kill or be killed world and there's really no way out.

The story involves a murder investigation, at least at first, but there are all sorts of twists and turns along the way. It's convoluted and at times I got lost.

But finally at the end the central driving force of everything is revealed, and it made ZERO sense to me. I had to do a bunch of research to figure out the meaning. Full River Red is apparently a poem schoolchildren learn in China but if you don't know the poem or Chinese history then the denouement is incomprehensible.

I'm not saying this as a criticism - it's perfectly fine to make a movie that only makes sense to the people of the country it's made in. I'm just offering a warning that the ending may not resonate as well if you didn't grow up in China.

Overall, I liked Full River Red but didn't love it. It's genuinely engrossing. The cast is good, particularly Teng Shen and Wang Jiayi. The score by Hong Han is amazing, with all these crazy punk songs that I've read are rocked-out Chinese folk songs. But the weird genre stew, the unpleasant brutality, and the puzzling-until-you-research-it ending made it less enthralling than the best of director Yimou Zhang's films.